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THE WORLD PEACE 
AND AFTER 



By 

Carl H. Grabo 




New York 

ALFRED A. KNOPF 

MCxMXVIII 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY 
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 



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m 27 1918 

PBZKTXD IN THB UNITBD STATH8 OT AMSBIOA 



CONTENTS 

Preface, 5 

Chapter I The Opportunity of the Peace, 13 

Chapter II International Relations, 26 

Chapter III The Citizen and the State, 76 

Chapter IV The New Social Morality, 117 

Chapter V Some Practical Considerations, 150 



PREFACE 

The following pages were written in large part 
shortly after the entrance of the United States into 
the world war. The international ideals there ex- 
pressed are such as many people the world over then 
held and have since come to hold with an increasing 
ardour of conviction. Only subsequently have some 
of these become specific issues of international diplo- 
macy. To the idealists of Russia, to the British 
Labour Party, and to Woodrow Wilson do we owe the 
insistence upon honourable, frank, and enlightened 
dealing among nations, no less than among individu- 
als, as fundamental to a just and lasting peace. 

But though enlightened and magnanimous ideals of 
an enduring peace are now a part of the world's 
thought, a theme of daily discussion, unfortunately 
they are far from being universally accepted ; nor are 
the enemies to them only those who combat them 
openly. Infinitely more dangerous is the secret op- 
position to them of a powerful class both at home 
and abroad. For these ideals are indirectly subver- 
sive of the old order; their implications are revolu- 
tionary. As I seek to demonstrate in this little book, 
their realization demands not only the construction 



PREFACE 



of a new diplomatic machinery; it demands also a 
social revolution — peaceful, perhaps, but radical — in 
each of our modem industrial states. 

We witness now the initial stages of that revolution. 
The world war has long since ceased to be only a war 
between rival groups of states; it is a conflict of 
ideals. It has become a war of classes ; war between 
the rights of persons and the rights of property. The 
powerful and propertied minorities the world over 
are being drawn together in a contest of survival 
waged with the masses, which, strong in numbers, are 
weak in organization, in leaders, in the tradition of 
authority, and have little control of the political and 
industrial machinery which has hitherto ruled the 
world. We are witness to the incipient stages of the 
last and greatest revolution, that by which the masses 
seek to wrest power from the bourgeoisie. Other 
revolutions in history have exacted power from kings 
and placed it in the hands of the nobility. These in 
turn have been largely merged with the commercial 
classes, and political and social power has shifted to 
the hands of those who control the wealth of the 
world. The revolution whose initial tremors we now 
discern but which may not be completed in our time 
is that which seeks to effect a still wider distribution 
of power: to place it truly where before it has been 
but ostensibly, in the hands of the people. 

Predictions are doubtless hazardous at this time, 



PREFACE 



but I look to see the best and most immediate results 
of the revolution in England. The British Labour 
Party has organized itself into a political engine 
which gives promise of controlling English policy, 
foreign and domestic. It has a program and leaders. 
Its policy is far-seeing and genuinely revolutionary, 
but its methods promise to be bloodless and its con- 
quests such as it can retain and solidify. What may 
occur in Russia no one can safely predict. It seems 
improbable that the old regime should ever be re- 
stored. On the other hand, the Bolsheviki seem to 
have before them an impossible task if they are to 
organize an industrial state truly controlled by the 
workers. The industrial condition in Russia has not 
sufficiently evolved to permit such control as yet; the 
masses are too ignorant; the leaders too few and 
visionary to cope with the immediate and tremendous 
economic problems. I look to see the restoration of 
political power in Russia to the hands of the moderate 
evolutionary Socialists, whose program will be to 
develop industrial machinery subject to state control 
and whose ultimate aim will be the complete absorp- 
tion of this machinery by a socialized state when a 
better educated proletariat shall be fitted to rule. 

France and the United States seem to me to offer 
the least immediate promise of wholesome and tangi- 
ble results. France is a nation of peasant proprietors 
and small business men. The French Revolution was 



8 PREFACE 



a bourgeois revolution and France has been largely 
content with bourgeois control. The spirit of nation- 
alism also is strong in France. Her silence upon the 
new internationalist ideals has been ominous. And 
we of this country have not found ourselves, do not 
know what we want, do not clearly realize what our 
true condition is. The warfare of capital and labour 
in the United States is still primitive. Our labour- 
ing classes have not yet become a political party 
realizing the necessity of a voice in national legisla- 
tion. And vast numbers of our middle classes have 
not wakened as yet to their true condition, nor to 
their prospects in a society in which capital becomes 
daily more strongly intrenched. 

In England one finds a more intelligent class con- 
sciousness than in the United States, more widespread 
thought upon political and social problems, so that 
despite hereditary class distinctions and other relics 
of an aristocratic past England bids fair to achieve 
a democracy which is industrial as well as political 
long before we in the United States have awakened 
fully to our true condition and to the changes needful 
to alter it. 

The pinch of war may, however, do much. The 
President and a few intelligent leaders have already 
done much and may do more. And it is certain that 
the next few years will greatly accelerate the sluggish 
flow of our political and social thinking. Though in 



PREFACE 



many respects the most backward of the civilized peo- 
ples, our entrance into the world war and our conse- 
quent participation in world thought must inevitably 
modify our insularity, our provinciality. A partici- 
pation in a world league for the maintenance of peace 
must lead us to consider those domestic evils whose 
destruction is essential if that peace is to be insured. 
We have, then, to consider the nature of our democ- 
racy and those obstacles which at present lie in the 
path to its better realization, a realization prerequisite 
to the assumption of our rightful place in a league of 
enlightened nations seeking to establish a world order 
more righteous, more enduring, more auspicious than 
this earth has yet seen. 



THE WORLD PEACE 
AND AFTER 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE PEACE 

During the three years and more that the world 
war has already persisted, years with their daily 
record of horror, many a thoughtful and sensitive 
American has asked himself, Is life worth living in 
a world in which these things are possible? Pessi- 
mistic youth asks that question when crossed in love, 
but mature men and women, who have endured pain 
and sorrow, usually find in the interest and promise 
of life a justification of existence. Yet when this 
ghoulish thing, like some abhorred familiar from the 
savage youth of the world, leaped upon us from the 
shadows, we wondered whether life did indeed con- 
tain true promise or whether our civilization and our 
moral progress were only a sham. For we should 
be superficial and naYve were we to wash our hands 
of responsibility and lay the blame of this war solely 

13 



14 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

upon the Germans. Rather we should search our 
hearts and cry in the words of Christian fleeing the 
wrath to come, "What shall I do to be saved?" 

"Salvation," however, no longer means to us of to- 
day individual redemption. The old narrow per- 
sonal morality of tlie Puritans has become a social 
morality, and when we seek "salvation" we seek it as 
a people craving the right way for the world whereby 
social injustice and national rivalries and hatreds — 
and the wars which spring from these — may be done 
away with forever. We wish to see our duty more 
clearly than before, our goal as American citizens 
solicitous for our righteousness as a people. And 
above all we wish to see our obligations in the sister- 
hood of nations so that we may aid the world to real- 
ize its hope of international unity. Strangely enough, 
that hope persists today despite the war; it is even 
stronger than before, for what was once only an as- 
piration and a dream has become a vital and immedi- 
ate necessity if civilization is to endure. Nor is this 
an inauspicious time to press for its realization. So 
great a change in the world's way of life demands for 
its inception intense emotion. This the war has 
brought. Mankind has been fired to a white heat; 
all our institutions, habits, and conventions lie plastic 
to our hand and we can refashion them in whatsoever 
forms it is our will to make. But we must strike 
while the metal is yet hot, before men and nations 



I 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE PEACE 15 

have hardened into the old moulds of custom or the 
chance moulds of circumstance. 

After the great fire of London in 1666, Sir Christo- 
pher Wren drew up plans for a finer city, one with 
wider and straighter streets, with open spaces for the 
admission of light and air, a nobler and fairer place 
in which men should dwell. But while he was en- 
deavouring to secure sanction for his reforms and the 
necessary means and legislation, the old city grew up 
as before, with its crooked and narrow streets and its 
crowded noisome tenements. The regenerating fire 
was of no profit, for the seventeenth century English- 
men had not the energy and wisdom to turn their 
misfortune to good uses. The old evils sprang up 
again like mushrooms, and two centuries and more 
were to elapse before the slow pressure of social 
forces achieved a few of the benefits — and these at 
great cost — which a little idealism, energy, and fore- 
sight could have secured at a blow when London lay 
in ashes. 

Much of our civilization both material and institu- 
tional lies in ashes today as the result of the great 
war. The choice is ours: to let the old evils with 
their ensuing certitudes of conflict and misery grow 
up as before, or to refashion civilization to finer, 
more ideal, uses. We lack neither leaders nor 
ideals. Much of the best thought of the world has 
pointed the way for us. The danger lies in delay. 



16 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

If we wait until the old habits and beliefs bind us 
again, until the ardour of unselfishness has cooled, 
until the religious emotions stirred by bereavement 
have become torpid, and the spirit of sacrifice in life 
and goods has become again the spirit of gain and 
greed — then we must thereafter be content with the 
slow groping progress that emerges from the conflict 
of narrow and blind forces. We have today an op- 
portunity such as no one of us will ever see again. 
It is ours to seize and mould the destinies of nations 
so that war will be forever impossible; and so to re- 
fashion the social order that justice and beauty may 
come to be where now are economic slavery and 
misery. 

Were the whole of the civilized world to turn to 
the task of reconstruction with the ardour and cour- 
age which has animated the millions who have laid 
down their lives for a cause they thought just, our 
civilization could in a few years attain that place 
which under normal conditions it might not attain in 
a century. We revere the young men who die so 
willingly for The Cause. But what that Cause is and 
the certainty of its attainment we only can determine, 
we who survive, we who do not risk our lives in the 
trenches. To us is given the greatest opportunity 
in history to regenerate the world, for we have ideals 
and science such as did not exist at the peace of 1815 
or at the conclusion of any world war comparable to 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE PEACE 17 

this. Should we refuse the opportunity, and by 
every delay, every failure to take thought, every 
compromise with our highest ideals, we shall refuse 
it, the strong young men will have given their lives 
for nothing. War in itself and the sacrifices of war 
are an unmixed evil. But it is the law of life that 
out of evil may come good, out of death life, out of a 
warring world the brotherhood of man — if we choose 
to have it so. 

The task for the citizen is to think as clearly as he 
can and to feel as deeply and purely. Emotion in- 
deed is there, much of it exalted emotion, for I believe 
the desire for good is more universal in the world 
today than ever before. No war has ever involved 
so great a part of mankind as this and in none com- 
parably great has there been so much unselfish sac- 
rifice for ideals, however mistaken some of these may 
be. But because of the very magnitude of the con- 
flict and the diversity of aims of the peoples involved, 
because of the very complexity of the political, social, 
and economic problems evoked, we are bewildered by 
the magnitude of the task of a righteous settlement. 
We have to devise a world in which war shall be im- 
possible, a question, it would seem, of international 
relations purely, of Hague courts, and an interna- 
tional police. Yet a moment's thought makes us 
aware that back of this machinery lie economic and 
social questions which must be met, and back of these, 



18 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

religious and ethical ideals. The reorganization of 
the world for the destruction of war demands the 
reorganization of every nation, and within each nation 
the creation of finer and clearer ideals, individual and 
social, for each of its citizens. 

The unity of the modem world for good or for evil 
is a self-evident fact. This is not a war of unmixed 
good clashing with unqualified evil. At its best, most 
ideally stated, it is a war of the democratic spirit 
upon a single form of autocracy, a form obvious be- 
cause an anachronism. The Prussian military state 
is a relic of the eighteenth century, is indeed almost 
feudal in form and spirit. But commingled with its 
militarism is an industrial autocracy no worse in in- 
tent though better realized in execution than the indus- 
trial autocracy of all modern highly developed states. 
A potential industrial autocracy, one far on the road 
to complete realization, exists in England and in the 
United States. With us it is not so evident as that 
of Prussia, its carnage and its possibilities of evil not 
so spectacular as those of Prussia's armed legions. 

In all states and in all times, today as yesterday, 
the conflict of the few and the many, of overlord and 
serf, of those who have and those who lack, of autoc- 
racy and democracy, persists. Out of this conflict 
spring wars and misery and the ills of this world. 
It will profit us little to crush militarism in Germany 
if we fail to recognize autocracy in England and 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE PEACE 19 

America and do not seek also to destroy it. In Eng- 
land and America, it is only fair to state, the oppos- 
ing force of democratic idealism is still strong, is 
not yet subdued to any remorseless philosophy of the 
superman. Many of those who practice autocracy 
among us would fail to recognize and would disclaim 
it were it dignified as a political philosophy. "Busi- 
ness is business" is a charitable creed covering divers 
evil practices the theory of which will not bear the 
light of day. The warfare of capital and labour is 
only now clearly recognized as a war of classes. We 
justify it only on the ground of immediate necessity. 
We do not admit that wealth is justified in all the 
practices it may see fit to employ, nor that in the 
order of things some few must always be rich and 
the vast majority poor. In Germany we find the cal- 
lous assumption that the majority are but cannon fod- 
der to be sacrificed at the word of the few. The open 
declaration and justification of this philosophy revolts 
us. 

The danger of German autocracy lies not so much 
in its avowed philosophy, which serves only to put 
other nations upon their guard and prompt them to its 
destruction, but in the efficiency which it has dis- 
played, the loyalty which it commands, and the ele- 
ments of good in it which have produced that loyalty. 
Its heartlessness has been in part compensated for by 
a better social order. The enslaved masses have en-^ 



20 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

joyed benefits in many respects superior to those 
which the masses in England and America have en- 
joyed. Order, eiEciency, education, comparative 
comfort, insurance against the evils of injury, sick- 
ness, and old age — all these have contributed to the 
content and loyalty of the German people, have made 
them blindly obedient and loyal to the commands of 
their superiors. And this very efficiency and loyalty 
constitute the menace of German autocracy to the 
freedom of the world. The rest of mankind have 
found autocracy in its political and industrial forms 
inefficient and productive of no good to them. They 
have turned, therefore, to democracy as their one 
hope, a democracy never as yet wholly successful 
because, perhaps, never given a thorough trial. 

Democracy, a truer democracy, industrial as well 
as political, seems indeed the one hope of the world 
today. Politically, the people of Western Europe 
are becoming convinced, as Americans long ago were 
convinced, that the rule of kings and overlords is a 
failure. They have largely done away with them. 
But the expected gain to human freedom has not been 
fully realized, for power has but changed its form. 
In America autocracy is not the power of a landed 
nobility with hereditary privilege, but the might of 
wealth exerting an insistent though often hidden pres- 
sure upon our political institutions. We are on the 
way to the establishment of a power as great and as 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE PEACE 21 

dangerous to human liberty as that of Prussian mili- 
tarism. The peace which we seek, international and 
permanent peace, will never be achieved until the 
power of wealth in the hands of industrial exploiters 
here and in England is democratized, passing from 
the hands of the few into the control of the many. 

We have also to confront the task, until now never 
clearly or widely realized, of making democratic con- 
trol of industry as efficient and as farsighted as auto- 
cratic government in its most successful instances has 
shown itself to be. It is a provocative fact that the 
relatively free and democratic powers, England, 
France, and the United States, have been able to meet 
the lesser might of the central empires upon some- 
thing like equal terms only as they have adopted the 
methods of the enemy. In England and France vir- 
tual dictatorships have been established, that in Eng- 
land a coalition of the reactionary forces of the 
Empire. Popular control of government, such as it 
was, has been suspended in order that the war may 
be fought to a successful conclusion. 

What, upon the establishment of peace, will be 
the domestic consequences of the centralization of 
power during war in each of the three great free 
peoples? Three possibilities suggest themselves: 

(1) England, France, and the United States may 
return to the conditions which existed previous to the 
war, those of industrial competition only slightly 



22 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

regulated by the state. The old laissez faire system, 
inefficient, wasteful, and unstable, may be re-estab- 
lished. But should this be the case we should have 
soon to face the likelihood of another conflict between 
the relatively unorganized and inefficient states and 
some power or group of powers autocratically direct- 
ing the might of industry to the attainment of national 
ambitions — Germany's attempt, all but successful, in 
the present war. In such a conflict, if the opposing 
forces of autocracy are anything like the equal of 
those of democracy in wealth of men and natural 
resources, there can be but one conclusion. In the 
present war, the central empires with far fewer men 
and far poorer resources than those of the Allies, 
have by virtue of better industrial organization all 
but overpowered the world. In the light of the sac- 
rifices which this war has exacted we dare not look 
forward to a repetition of the struggle. 

(2) The second, the more likely, and by far the 
more dangerous possibility is that the democratic 
nations, having learned from the enemy the manifest 
advantage to industrial organization of autocratic 
control, may re-establish their governments after the 
peace upon a highly centralized basis not subject to 
the popular will. There will be a strong movement 
to this end. Industrial leaders in England and 
America, realizing the advantages of a strong central 
organization which shall fuse political and industrial 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE PEACE 23 

power, will seek to retain it, but subject to their con- 
trol, not to that of the people. The economic advan- 
tages of such a centralization have been demon- 
strated. It makes for the elimination of waste and 
for swift and precise action. It offers, too, as in 
Germany, advantages to the worker in improved 
working and living conditions, more regular em- 
ployment and at a fixed wage, better opportunity 
for education, a greater security. It offers what 
Germany has given her people. But if such indus- 
trial and efficient states, controlled by a class and not 
by the mass, should be established, and the possibil- 
ity is far from negligible, the war of democracy will 
need to be fought again, not as a war between nations 
and groups of nations but a war of class with class 
the world over. 

(3) A third possibility and, of all, the most diffi- 
cult of attainment is that upon the realization of which 
the freedom and welfare of the world depend. It is 
the reorganization of modem states in such wise that 
industrial efficiency may be secured, but subject to 
democratic control: it requires the centralization of 
political and economic power undominated by any 
class, whether a bureaucracy, as in Germany, a landed 
nobility, as in England, or leaders of industry and 
finance, as in the United States. Democracy can 
survive this war only as it draws strength from the 
forces it seeks to overcome, learning the power and 



24 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

efficiency of Germany whilst losing nothing of the 
freedom which it now has nor the power of attaining 
that greater freedom to which it aspires. 

In the large impersonal view of nature, this war 
may seem but a contest for survival between two rival 
orders of life. Germany has displayed something 
of that organization, efficiency, and subordination of 
the individual to the purposes of the group which we 
marvel at in the colonies of ants and bees. The 
peoples of England and the United States, like the 
birds, are less gregarious, less able to co-ordinate 
numbers to an end and sacrifice the individual to a 
community purpose. But it does not follow that one 
only of the rival orders can survive and that the other 
must perish. Were they to continue side by side 
unmodified, this might be the case. They are not, 
however, distinct orders, but members of the same 
species, and supposedly high enough in the evolu- 
tionary scale to profit by experience and learn 
through imitation. Were they to fuse their seem- 
ingly opposed ideals of the state, a society might be 
constructed in which a highly centralized power, po- 
litical and economic, would permit the utmost prac- 
ticable degree of individual freedom. Such, at any 
rate, difficult as its attainment is, must be the aim of 
a reorganized world upon the conclusion of peace. 
Democracy, to survive as a working ideal and as a 
force sufficiently strong to combat autocracy whether 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE PEACE 25 

political or industrial, must profit by its failures in 
this war. Not otherwise can the danger of the rise 
to power of other states upon the German plan be 
discounted. States in which there exists no strong 
democratic ideal, as for instance Japan, may learn 
from the present war not that autocracy is dangerous 
to the liberties of men, but that autocracy, guiding a 
highly organized industrial system, is strong. Such 
a state may be deterred by no altruism, no passion 
for individual liberty, from the attainment of its im- 
perial ambitions. Individual freedom and the in- 
creased power of the state: these two, however seem- 
ingly opposed, must be somehow reconciled one to 
the other. We must solve the paradox of a co-opera-i 
live society which yet respects individual rights, in 
which the individual gives himself to the services of 
the state but retains his share of state control and 
receives in so doing a greater measure of freedom 
for the development of his powers, for self-realiza- 
tion, than he now possesses. To attempt the defini- 
tion of such freedom is the purpose of this discussion. 



II 

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 

We have so long been taught to think of the world 
in terms of states that it is only with a conscious and 
violent effort that we are able to detach ourselves 
from the glamour of patriotism, from the glories of 
emperors, kings, and presidents, from the rhapsodies 
of literature personifying the nation as a young and 
beautiful woman, and to look upon the state as it 
really is: its origin, its justification, its services, and 
its defects. In childhood we are given flags and 
guns; in the schools we learn of the Pilgrim Fathers, 
of George Washington, and Lincoln; and in maturity 
we read our nation's history or see it in the making. 
We contrast our customs, our virtues, our women with 
the like but inferior possessions of foreigners. And 
throughout all this educative process our minds are 
unconsciously warped to an artificial conception of 
the state. Our country is personified as Uncle Sam, 
a benevolent and shrewd old gentleman of rustic 
quaintness; or as Columbia, a deep-chested starry- 
eyed goddess emblematic of liberty. Our conception 
is a figure of speech, a poetic misrepresentation of 

2e 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 27 

reality; and we are so constituted that it is all but 
impossible ever to see this reality with fresh and un- 
distorted vision. 

Yet the state is purely an artificial and in a 
sense an unreal creation, largely the product of for- 
tuitous circumstance. It is merely a body of people 
occupying a certain portion of the earth's surface 
which has more or less sharply defined topographic 
barriers. This group of persons has a certain form 
of government, certain laws, traditions, literature, 
and speech which differentiate them from neighbour- 
ing groups on the other side of a river or sea or 
separated from them by so slight a barrier as a row 
of stone posts suitably engraved with coats of 
arms. States virtually are but families occupying 
adjacent properties which are visibly demarked by 
fences and hedges. Like families, too, races have 
slightly differing customs, differing tastes in food 
and dress, and differing conceptions of the duties of 
children to their elders. But the likenesses are 
far more remarkable than the dissimilarities. All 
are composed of men and women who love and 
aspire, work and play, beget and bear children, and 
in due time die and are buried with appropriate 
ceremonies. Differences even of race, apparent in 
the hue of skin, form of features, and colour of hair 
and eyes, are superficial only. To the surgeon lay- 
ing bare the nerves and muscles of the body, and to 



28 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

the poet laying bare the dreams and aspirations of 
the soul, men are alike the world over. The maxims 
of Confucius resemble the teachings of Christ, Balder 
is but another name for Apollo, and the cultured man 
of America or Russia turns to the plays of Sophocles 
or the aphorisms of Marcus Aurelius for spiritual 
consolation and enlightenment. 

Why, then, are barriers erected between the various 
members of the human family and the hedges separat- 
ing one group and another set with mantraps and pit- 
falls? The answer is to be found, of course, in 
the history of the human race. The barriers and the 
consequent hostility and hatred are inheritances of 
savagery and barbarism. The human race, pastoral 
or sea-going, spreading in groups over the surface of 
the earth, marked off each one as much land as it 
could defend from the encroachment of others, and 
within the boundaries so defined, developed laws and 
institutions peculiar to itself. As more land, access 
to the sea, or "a place in the sun" seemed desirable, 
a group warred with its neighbours and seized what 
it could or was driven back within its former bound- 
aries. Much of human history is no more than the 
record of this ebb and flow of groups, their con- 
quests and failures. It is a record of shifting fron- 
tiers and the consequent though minor implications of 
a varying culture, religion, and law. 

So conceived, history seems little more than the 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 29 

record of economic necessity or greed. And such it 
is in its larger outlines, which, however, are blurred 
by numerous secondary considerations. Man, though 
the victim of economic circumstance and lusting 
after the goods of this earth, is in his soul a theo- 
logian and poet. Wherever he may be forced to 
dwell he will evolve his notions of a deity and devise 
a ritual for worship, frame a philosophy, and specu- 
late upon the meaning of life and the movements of 
the stars. And his thoughts and aspirations he will 
set forth in his poetry and his art. He will fashion 
a code of laws whereby justice, as he conceives it, 
may be secured. Gods and ceremonies, poetry and 
legal codes will, among peoples of somewhat equal 
culture, be much alike in substance, however various 
in form and nonessentials. The purpose of religion 
amongst all peoples is to know God, the ideal of art 
is to express the wonder and poignancy of life, and 
the aim of law and political institutions to secure jus- 
tice and a peaceful life. These purposes are common 
to all peoples, and differ only in the means of their 
attainment. 

Yet to realize this essential unity of all races and 
peoples is not, in practice, easy. Barriers of lan- 
guage and custom, hostility born of trivial differences 
in manners, and more than all else ignorance of his- 
tory and comparative religion have until modem times 
bred intolerance and hatred. Even today, among 



30 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

the most enlightened peoples, we cannot declare reli- 
gious and social tolerance to be universal. But the 
auto da fe is gone and the pogrom, too, it may be, is a 
thing of the past. In English eyes all Frenchmen are 
no longer immoral, nor in French eyes all Ameri- 
cans avaricious money getters lacking an appreciation 
of philosophy and art. In these respects the world 
has grown less provincial of late and we can look 
forward hopefully to the complete eradication of 
such childish prejudices from enlightened peoples. 

But these barriers between peoples are superficial 
and their removal, however much it may facilitate 
travel, agreeable intercourse, and the interchange of 
art, literature, and ideas, does not destroy the funda- 
mental cause of the hostility among nations, which is 
economic. Economic pressure and the thirst for con- 
quest have made the frontiers of states as we know 
them today. Economic barriers of tariffs, govern- 
ment subsidies, and export duties keep alive the fic- 
tion that races and nations are more different than 
alike. And the belief in national destiny, the right 
of a "superior" race to control the destinies of one 
deemed "inferior," and the trade rivalries of com- 
peting economic groups among nations, are still po- 
tent for future alliances, conquests, and wars, unless 
at this opportune moment for the establishment of a 
world order insuring peace, the root source of inter- 
national hatreds is recognized and removed. 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 31 

§2 

The liberation of the small oppressed peoples — 
Belgium, Servia, and Poland — is now one of the de- 
clared objects of the Allies in pursuing the war to a 
successful conclusion. Whatever political and eco- 
nomic factors determined the original alignment of 
nations, however much England's concern for the in- 
dependence and security of Servia and Belgium was 
at first due to a jealous fear of German aggrandize- 
ment, the desire that the little peoples may hence- 
forth be enabled to live a free and unmolested exist- 
ence has become, during the process of the war itself, 
a moving popular force. This will be of weight in 
determining the conditions of peace. A war in origin 
political and economic, the work of "secret diplo- 
macy," has become clearer and more idealistic in 
purpose as those who have offered their lives in the 
conflict have sought a worthy reason for doing so. 

The cause of the war is no longer The Cause in the 
war. The conditions of peace offered the vanquished 
by the victors are the test of the purity of motive 
attained through sacrifice and suffering. A recogni- 
tion of this fact is evident in the English concern for 
the right settlement of the Irish question. England, 
seeking a restored Belgium and an independent Po- 
land, dares suffer no longer the reproach of an op- 
pressed Ireland. Nor need we suppose that the 



32 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

desire to avoid the reproach of hypocrisy is the sole 
motive for England's action. A devastated Belgium 
has served to quicken the consciences of all civilized 
peoples, bringing them to a realization of their own 
sins and national obligations. 

Yet just and desirable as is the re-establishment of 
autonomy and the restoration of the devastated lands 
of the little peoples, the victims of this war, it re- 
mains to be seen if the implications of the act are 
fully recognized by an England, France, and Italy 
concluding a victorious peace. What of India, what 
of Austria and the Trentino, what of Alsace-Lorraine, 
and what of the German colonies in Africa and the 
East? Is the principle to be laid down that all peo- 
ples, black and yellow no less than white, are ulti- 
mately, if not immediately, to be left free to realize 
their destinies without interference by the Powers? 
Is England to say to India, as the United States has 
said to the Philippines, "Once you have learned self- 
government and desire it we will withdraw and per- 
mit you to manage your own affairs"? England 
realizes in the present crisis that the strength of the 
empire lies in the voluntary association of her self- 
governing colonies. Canada and Australia re- 
sponded more quickly to England's need than did 
England herself. Will England accord the privilege 
of association in the empire to a self-governing 
India, or even, perhaps, permit India to enter some 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 33 

separate federation of Eastern peoples under the 
hegemony of Japan? If England refuses to declare 
for the principle of autonomy for all her subject peo- 
ples, the purity of her idealism in a war for human 
liberty, for democracy, may rightly be impugned. 

The disposition of the German colonies will like- 
wise serve to determine the character of this war. If 
these are divided among the Allies, on the pretext, 
perhaps, that they will afford part compensation for 
the war costs, then the war will show itself to be what 
most wars in the past have been, a war of conquest. 
Idealism, purity of motive, are, let us repeat, proved 
to the world only by the nature of the peace terms 
imposed upon the conquered. Rhetoric and patriotic 
protestations prove nothing in themselves; they must 
be verified by deeds. Insofar as German colonies are 
genuinely German, democratic fair dealing demands 
their restoration to Germany. Insofar as they are 
conquests of weaker peoples they should be restored 
to their original owners and let alone or, under some 
form of international guidance, aided along the path 
of self-government to democracy. Recent declara- 
tions by Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson 
promise the renunciation of colonial conquests made 
in the war. The British Labor Party demands that 
the colonies of Equatorial Africa, English as well as 
German, be brought under international control. In 
its remarkable program English Labor disclaims all 



34 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

thought of imperial conquest whether by force of arms 
or by trade. But thus far these ideals are the ex- 
pression of a minority group. It is far from certain 
that were the Allies victorious in the near future such 
ideals would find expression in the peace terms im- 
posed upon the Central Powers. A defeated Ger- 
many we must hope for but not a Germany so impo- 
tent that the military dictators in England and France 
nor the faction in the United States hostile to Presi- 
dent Wilson can realize their imperialistic ends. 

More formidable than the threat of territorial con- 
quests has been the declared purpose of the Allies 
to wage economic war upon the Central Powers after 
the military peace. The Paris agreement has worked 
infinite harm, has done more than any other cause 
perhaps to strengthen the power of German resistance 
and to make the liberal elements of Germany and 
Austria sceptical of the sincerity of our peace offers. 
President Wilson has disclaimed any adherence to 
such a program; the British Labor Party has abjured 
it. But those in audiority in England and France 
have been silent or evasive for the most part. It is 
apparent that the exploiting groups in those countries 
still have hopes of depriving Germany of her former 
place in the commerce of the world and are not yet 
ready to readmit Germany and Austria on equal terms 
with them to world markets. That the Dardanelles 
should be open to the trade of all nations is a con- 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 35 

summation to be wished. But German and Austrian 
access to the Mediterranean and to the trade routes 
of Asia Minor is equally legitimate and imperative 
if the world is to be freed from the menace of eco- 
nomic war, the inevitable precursor to a war of arms. 

A mixture of idealism and selfishness, of demo- 
cratic sentiment and commercial calculation, is evi- 
dent throughout the history of the war: in its obscure 
origins, in the confused purposes manifest in the dec- 
larations of the participants, and in the intimations of 
the peace terms to be demanded by the victors. The 
German proposals, save insofar as they express a jus- 
tifiable desire for national security, are frankly self- 
ish and dangerous and need not concern us. But 
great indeed must be our concern lest selfish and mis- 
taken motives dominate the policy of the Allies. In- 
evitably, insofar as the Allies look to secure national 
advantage and economic domination tlirough the 
peace settlement, this peace will prove not the final 
world peace for which men hope but an armistice 
only, a truce between rival groups of exploiters. The 
men who have given their blood so freely in the hope 
that good might come of their sacrifice will then have 
died in vain. 

It is therefore needful to consider the true causes 
of war, the essential nature of autocracy, the char- 
acter of democracy, and the relation of these to a 
world peace. These questions must be seen in clear 



36 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

and simple outlines, seen in the large, unconfused 
by minor and perplexing issues, in order that we 
may perceive the path which mankind must follow to 
freedom and happiness. Insofar as we have power 
we must guide the world into the true path at the 
present auspicious moment. We cannot believe too 
intensely that this is a crucial point in human history, 
a moment which may determine the welfare of the 
world for generations. On the one hand lies the 
dreary prospect of endless rivalries, jealousies, and 
oppressions such as the world has always known, 
with their weight of misery for the greater part of 
mankind. And on the other lies the prospect of a 
fair and ordered world advancing with an ever clearer 
vision along the path of freedom and beauty, with 
science and art and noble living not the chance acces- 
sories of a limited class but the whole of life for 
everyone. 

§3 
The desire for power, the might of empire, the 
Alexanders, the Caesars, and Napoleons, the Clives, 
the Bismarcks, and the Rhodes's — these are the forces 
and the names which colour the page of history and 
thrill us as we read. They summon to mind centu- 
rions with their wounds all to the front, the Old Guard 
dying at Waterloo, Sepoys and sieges, diamonds and 
gold mines, and diplomatic lying and intrigue ele- 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 37 

vated to the realm of art. They are picturesque and 
enthralling and it is easy to forget their true signifi- 
cance, the basis upon which they were reared — the 
bodies and the bones of men. Power and empire are 
economic. The legions of Caesar were paid with the 
tribute of kings and each ounce of gold represented 
the toil of men sweating in the fields and the mines 
or braving death upon the sea. The Grand Army 
sacked Europe. The wealth of India and South 
Africa was wrung from the bodies of yellow and 
black men. The price of Alsace-Lorraine was the 
blood of German boys, and the tribute wrested from 
France was paid from tlie hoardings of peasants. 
This is the background of world dominion and the 
might of empire. It is as true in peace as in war. 
World power is wrung from the factory workers in 
Manchester, Essen, and Pittsburgh, and from the 
negroes of the Congo and the Indians in the upper 
reaches of the Amazon. Empire is based on the ex- 
ploitation of the many by the few, and none of the 
glories of war or the triumphs of peace should blind 
us to that fact. All world powers share the guilt, 
those we speak of as autocratic and those which we 
call democratic, and the callousness of Prussian mili- 
tarism and schrecklichkeit should not blind us to the 
sins that are ours. 

Though "dollar diplomacy" is the true diplomacy 
of practical statesmen the world over, there are inci- 



38 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

dental and contributing currents of altruism which 
mollify national aggression and selfishness. Some 
years ago there was much talk of the "white man's 
burden." The European peoples professed their 
obligation to bring light and justice to the dark cor- 
ners of the earth. Missionaries follow the flag, and 
the commercial traveller sells cotton goods to the con- 
verts shamed in their nudity by the teachings of the 
Gospel. It is easy to be cynical and to declare all 
missionary enterprise a sham, a device to secure trade. 
So the Germans believe all Englishmen hypocrites 
professing the enlightened destiny of England and 
making enlightenment pay. To call the Englishman 
hypocritical is to misunderstand his mixed motives. 
He desires to make money but he also likes to see 
things "decent," to have the law administered with- 
out fear or corruption. He contrives to achieve both 
aims, though the desire to make money may be domi- 
nant. 

Were commercialism, however, so callous and so 
clear sighted as to civilize only to exploit, it would in 
its establishment of courts and its endowment of 
schools and missions defeat its own purpose. For 
though a subject people, in its development from 
savagery to civilization, may for a time provide good 
markets, the moment comes when the exchange of a 
string of gold nuggets for a string of glass beads 
ceases to be possible. And with the establishment of 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 39 

order and justice and the growth of education comes 
national self -consciousness and a desire for political 
and economic independence. Japan learned early 
and well the white man's mechanical skill and now 
profits commercially from him. India, too, I take it, 
is less profitable now to England than in the time 
of Clive and must grow increasingly self-sufficient. 
England gives more in administrative efficiency than 
once and for what she imports in goods must pay a 
fairer price. Thus commercialism in part defeats 
its purpose of giving as little as it can for as much 
as it can get, for men are, happily, so constituted 
that with the left hand they unconsciously undo some 
of the evils committed by the right. 

Yet the commercial might of England still is based 
upon control of the sea, vast foreign markets, and 
an industrial population fortunately situated with 
respect to the raw materials of machine industry, coal 
and iron. Still more is her power based upon vast 
accumulations of capital, which enable her to invest 
abroad and do on a smaller scale in her colonies what 
she has done at home, subjugate the consumer to the 
will of capital and exact profits from the toil of 
coolie and factory hand. As the world grows, the 
profits of industrial enterprise become less the tribute 
exacted by the conqueror from subject peoples and 
more the toll of the exploiting class exacting its gains 
indifferently from all classes the world over, includ- 



40 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 



ing the working and consuming classes of its own 
people. 

Germany, less happily situated than England and 
with inferior resources in soil and mines, entering the 
race for colonies too late to acquire many of commer- 
cial value, has been able through technical education 
and the efficiency of a highly centralized and auto- 
cratic control of all the forces of her people, to 
acquire the prestige which she enjoyed at the opening 
of the present war. Endowed by nature with infe- 
rior opportunities she has rivalled and in many re- 
spects surpassed both England and the United States 
in the excellence and cheapness of her manufactures. 
In Germany as nowhere else in the world and as never 
before in history autocracy has achieved an almost 
perfect industrial success. 

This success, moreover, and herein lies the threat 
of autocracy to the freer peoples throughout the world, 
has been attained without alienating the loyalty of its 
citizens. We must not forget that the patriotic spirit 
of the Germans is as fervid as that of the French and 
English, that they have made unspeakable sacrifices 
and borne patiently greater hardships than have any 
other of the large nations in the struggle. Such 
patriotism bespeaks more than ingrained obedience 
and sacrifice of self at the behest of the state. It is 
born of material well-being, opportunity for recrea- 
tion and culture, education, security, and freedom 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 41 

from the terrors of accident and old age — all these 
made possible by autocratic foresight and executive 
ability. 

Is it not significant that despite a population too 
vast for her restricted territories, Germany has sent 
to America during the last two decades far fewer 
emigrants than in the '50's and '60's when her indus- 
trial system had not been established and her popu- 
lation was relatively small? Germany, the least 
democratic of the great nations, has succeeded where 
the democratic countries have failed: she has cared 
for her people, seen to their bodily welfare, and 
largely contented them. The wisdom of Bismarck 
in stealing the thunder of the social-democrats and 
anticipating the popular demand for industrial better- 
ment has been vindicated by the loyalty of the Ger- 
mans to their government in this war. They have 
suffered much and may yet endure more. Restriction 
of liberty at the polls, in the press, in speech, weigh 
little against the outstanding fact that in Germany, 
during peace, life is reasonably secure, material 
comfort assured to all who will accept their lot in 
life as determined by birth and material circumstance, 
and old age, accident, and ill-health are robbed in 
part of their terrors by a thorough and compulsory 
system of state insurance. 

In England, France, and the United States the 
worker has a vote, he may go and come as he likes, 



42 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

he may speak freely in criticism (j; his government 
and his king or president. But he has few other 
privileges and may better his material position only 
through his own efforts or through co-operation in a 
labour union. The state does little to aid him, little to 
insure shorter hours of toil, better working conditions, 
higher wages, or security in illness and old age. He 
can secure only what he is able to extort by political 
and industrial pressure, and this is far less actual than 
theoretical. Like his fellows in all but the capi- 
talistic class he is the victim of circumstance, must 
take whatever employment offers, at the usual wage, 
and is seldom so fortunate as materially to improve 
his condition. The state does not insure him a sound 
education, adequate training for any calling, nor does 
it care for him when he and his family become the 
victims of accident or industrial depressions. 

The German statesman looks upon the democratic 
countries with contempt. He sees tlieir wasteful 
methods, their disease, crime, and poverty. He 
sees that only after much time and loss do they be- 
come efficient in war. The autocracy of Germany 
seems by comparison a far more efficient form of 
government. Nor is the German worker blind to the 
same contrast. He sees that political freedom 
divorced from industrial security is illusory. He 
would wish more voting power, a fuller representation 
in the Reichstag, and other reforms. But he clings 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 43 

to his manifest advantages and prefers to remain in 
Germany under his kaiser and bureaucrats rather 
than emigrate to freer countries where the advantages 
he knows at home are to be won only by the few. 

In England and the United States we have made a 
little progress in social legislation and improvement 
during the last fifteen years, stirred thereto by the 
example of Germany. But broadly speaking the con- 
trast is as stated. Politically we are free, not actually 
but potentially. Freedom is ours, that is to say, if we 
have the sense to seize it. But industrially we are not 
free but enslaved; not to specific institutions, govern- 
ments, and kings but to the unregulated social and 
economic forces of our society. We are enslaved in 
the sense that the savage is enslaved by ignorance, the 
whim of the seasons, the fertility of soil and timeli- 
ness of rains, or the migrations of the elk and caribou. 
Classes and groups struggling to achieve control of 
the sources of wealth enslave the individual no less 
than do the forces of nature. 

Economic well being is not the whole of life, to be 
sure. Freedom of movement and speech, the right 
to vote for one's representative in government, are 
great and important rights, won at great cost and 
marking a long step in human progress. But the 
rights of education, enjoyment of leisure, freedom 
from the terrors of accident, sickness, and pauperism 
are great rights also; they, loo, are liberty, and of 



44 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

this kind of liberty the democratic peoples know all 
too little. The well-disciplined German, innocent of 
a desire to walk upon the grass plot marked verboten, 
feels it no restriction upon his freedom that he may 
not. But were he deprived of those privileges for 
which he cares, his right of recreation and music, and 
his freedom from insecurity he would shake the pil- 
lars of empire. A free citizen of the United States 
may exercise the right to vote, may denounce presi- 
dent and congress, and may read and circulate revo- 
lutionary literature. But he may, incidentally, never 
realize a decent education, the right to sleep in a com- 
fortable bed, breathe fresh air, and play with his 
children in a garden of his own. 

Never before has autocracy been so formidable to 
the progress of the world as that of Germany now, for 
never before has autocracy contrived to make its 
people so content. And we might be tempted to add 
that democracy has not for long been so feeble as 
now, in view of the tremendous coalition needed to 
defeat Germany. But democracy has thus far in 
the world's history been largely illusory, an aspira- 
tion rather than an achieved fact. It has never been 
so paramount as autocracy now is in Germany. Per- 
haps it may demonstrate its power, once firmly estab- 
lished and more completely realized, to control the in- 
dustrial forces of society so that all its citizens may 
know security and bodily well being. That, at any 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 45 



rate, is democracy's one hope not alone against Ger- 
many but against autocracy the world over. Ger- 
many defeated in this war will grow strong again. 
We cannot impose our institutions upon her by 
force. The spirit of autocracy in Germany, if it is 
to be destroyed must be destroyed from within. And 
this can be only when the German citizen looking 
abroad sees the examples of a finer and freer way of 
life in the democratic states about him. If he sees 
this truer freedom and finer life manifested in the 
institutions and social well being of his neighbours 
he will be emulous of them. 

These ideals and object lessons we must supply. 
We must exemplify in the organization and conduct 
of our peoples the possibilities of a democracy truly 
free yet efficient. This is our one hope not alone for 
the defeat of Germany but for the defeat of autocracy 
the world over. For it is not impossible that a re- 
alignment of autocratic powers, twenty-five or fifty 
years hence, might overthrow the struggling, half- 
realized democracies of the world. Suppose the cen- 
tral powers, humiliated by the terms of peace and 
desirous of revenge, preparing themselves for a sec- 
ond war, allying themselves with an autocratic Japan 
which controls China and her resources of men and 
materials. Suppose India clamouring for self-gov- 
ernment denied by England. The mastery of the 
world might pass to autocracy and the democratic 



46 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

ideal be delayed a hundred years in its realization. 
Only as democracy conquers not by the sword but 
by the evidences it gives of its divine fitness to rule 
because of its advancement of human welfare will it 
effectually overcome militarism and the desire for 
imperial sway. Then only will the German or the 
Japanese look with discontent upon the social system 
of which he is a part and alter it after a better model. 

§ 4 
What is this democracy in whose name we make 
war upon autocracy? We associate it in some way 
with freedom, but the nature of this freedom, the re 
strictions imposed upon it by necessity, and the pos 
sibilities of its enlargement we often do not consider 
Complete freedom of the individual means, doubt 
less, opportunity to do whatsoever he wills, to work 
or rest, or play as he likes, to go wherever he elects 
to eat what he prefers, and gratify all bodily and 
mental desires as he chooses. Such freedom is im- 
possible to man. Barriers of seas and mountains, an 
imperious hunger, which he must satisfy, and the con- 
flicting desires of other men with whom he must per- 
force live, hedge in each one, confine him to a rela- 
tively small portion of the earth's surface, impose 
upon him the necessity of toil if he is to eat, and 
demand that the conflict of his desires with those of 
other men be somehow reconciled. Government in 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 47 

communities and states is the imperative compromise 
effected by individuals each desirous of doing many- 
things the right to which he must surrender if he is 
to retain others. The surrender of liberties is, then, 
the first requisite for the establishment of any gov- 
ernment. The function of government is to make 
the surrender rest as lightly as possible upon the in- 
dividual and to compensate for it by the grant of 
privileges which spring from the association of in- 
dividuals under wise guidance. 

In empires, kingdoms, and aristocracies the sur- 
render of freedom is not uniform throughout the 
state nor is the distribution of new freedoms under 
the government, equal. Kings and lords enjoy im- 
munities unknown to the mass of the people. The 
theory upon which freedom of movement, exemption 
from manual toil, and other privileges are granted 
the few or forcibly seized by them is that in return 
these chosen individuals shall give their services to 
the wise governing of the state. It is held that 
wealth, lands, and hereditary succession are essential 
to the maintenance of such leadership. The system 
of government is so devised as to make the persistence 
of the social order as established, secure. Were the 
rulers freely elected to office by the people, the reten- 
tion of privilege in the hands of a class would not 
long continue. A king if elected is, therefore, elected 
by the nobles or those representative of the prop- 



48 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

ertied interests. He is not chosen, as in the tribe, by 
the vote of all the warriors. A property qualifica- 
tion has been established. 

As wealth accumulates and as political power 
comes to mean increased privilege — immunity from 
toil, choicer food, more delicate women, exemptions 
before the law — political machinery manipulated by 
a ruling class is made to subserve the interests of that 
class at the expense of the mass. Without the debas- 
ing pressure of privilege and exemption the aristo- 
crat, or much more, the king, has as an incentive to 
honourable action the admiration and good will of 
his people. But with privilege and the power to per- 
petuate privilege by political control, selfish gratifica- 
tions become usually more seductive than the desire 
for honour. It is then that empires become magnifi- 
cent and are destroyed, that aristocracies perish of 
dry rot, and new rulers and new hereditary orders 
succeed the old and repeat the cycle of glory and 
decay. 

Such has been the history of the world until recent 
times and the growth of the democratic ideal. An 
hereditary aristocracy has resisted the movement of 
the mass to take political power into its hands, and 
still resists, as in England, by absorbing men of 
political and financial achievements, thus renewing its 
blood and increasing its wealth. Nevertheless the 
democratic ideal, that men should share equally in the 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 49 

burdens and privileges of government, has grown 
stronger and modified the political institutions of all 
progressive countries. Yet with the extension of the 
franchise and the adoption of various devices whereby 
the participation in government of hitherto inarticu- 
late classes has seemed assured has come little 
amelioration of the common lot. Men have fought 
for the ballot thinking that in it lay the power to 
set them free, and they have found themselves still 
the slaves of circumstance. Aristocracies and class 
distinctions may be swept away, kings and titles de- 
stroyed, but power remains, as before, not with the 
mass but with a class. 

Power resides in property. Those with wealth 
have found a hundred ways in which to emasculate 
democratic political institutions whose purpose has 
been to establish genuine popular control of govern- 
ment. To retain the privileges and immunities of 
aristocracy, if not the name, has been the object 
and to a great extent the achievement of the propertied 
class. It has resorted to bribery, controlled the ma- 
chinery of elections, intimidated and bewildered the 
masses, and seduced popular leaders inimical to its 
security in ways no less efficacious than direct bribery: 
by marriage alliances, social recognition, flattery, by 
off"ering easy roads to wealth. Like all intelligent 
aristocracies it has seen that the permanency of its 
tenure to power lies in its ability to absorb the most 



50 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

courageous, ambitious, and intelligent of the men of 
all classes who seek to rise. The mass is powerless 
without leaders. It is the policy of aristocracy to be 
hospitable to such men and make them a part of it- 
self. 

Democracy may mean, then, and does mean today 
in America three things : It is an ideal of government 
— of the people, by the people, and for the people — 
an ideal only in part realized; it means institutions 
to the attainment of this ideal, and these in part we 
have, though their efficacy has not proved what we 
hoped; and lastly it means opportunity to rise from 
the mass and share in the privileges and immunities 
of class. It is upon this equality of opportunity 
that as a nation we chiefly pride ourselves. This is 
the democracy which appeals to the ambitious Ameri- 
can. It is his boast and belief that anyone in the 
country has the opportunity of becoming president, or 
what is yet more desirable, a captain of industry 
and master of great wealth. 

Yet if this democracy of opportunity upon which 
the American prides himself ever truly existed, does 
it exist today as widely as once? Does not the growth 
in power and stability of our industries and financial 
institutions and the concentration of the country's 
wealth in the hands of a relatively small class, yearly 
increase the difficulty of entrance into that class? 
The boastful American points to a Harriman, Schwab, 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 51 

or Ford to prove his belief that any "hustling" 
American can become a millionaire provided he has 
the brains and the grit, but I believe that the advertis- 
ing pages of the popular magazines afford a better 
clue to the trend of the times. In them you will read 
of the fifty-thousand dollar man and the hundred- 
thousand dollar man wanted to manage a great in- 
dustry, or of the man who attained such a position 
through mastering an encyclopedia or a memory 
system. It is a large wage, but still a wage. The 
organizing and directing genius of the country may 
rise high in the service of vested wealth. But it is 
the servant of it and maintains its place only for serv- 
ice rendered. De Tocqueville predicted that the dan- 
ger to American democratic institutions lay in the ap- 
propriation of legal talent to the services of wealth 
and industry. That prediction came to pass long ago. 
We witness today the analogous appropriation of in- 
dustrial and business talent to the like service. De- 
mocracy of opportunity in America means the oppor- 
tunity to become a high salaried servant, and this 
opportunity is open only to a few, by reason of un- 
equal education, strength, chance, and a host of factors 
which make the freest competition other than "free." 
But equality of opportunity, if, with the unequal 
powers of men such can ever truly exist, is not the 
ideal democracy for which men are willing to die. 
By equality of opportunity we mean, at the best, op- 



52 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

portunity to surpass our fellows and attain privileges 
which they do not enjoy: it is equal opportunity to at- 
tain the state of inequality. So defined, democracy 
could connote neither equality nor freedom. It is 
a far remove from that aspiration to bear equally 
and share equally which, I take it, men feel the demo- 
cratic ideal to be: the belief that all men, however un- 
equal their powers, should have equal opportunity 
for happiness, self realization to the best of their 
ability, and equal freedom, practicable in a society, 
from the restraints upon the body. Such an ideal 
demands that political power equally shared be de- 
voted to the establishment of an industrial democracy. 
Free political institutions, desirable as these are, do 
not constitute a sufficient end in themselves. They 
are chiefly desirable as an instrument whereby men 
may attain a more tangible equality in labour, goods, 
and opportunity for enjoyment. 

Freedom, let us repeat, can never be absolute. It 
can mean only this: a bondage equally shared, a 
privilege equally enjoyed. It is not that autocracy 
imposes restrictions upon the will of the individual 
which makes it irksome. All society must restrict 
the individual. But that this restriction may be as 
light as possible it must be imposed and borne by all. 
Only as men bear and share alike can they work to the 
common end of making their burdens lighter and 
their enjoyment greater. When the burden is un- 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 53 

equal, selfishness inevitably leads the few to profit at 
the expense of the many. And this is autocracy, the 
imposition of the will of the few upon the conduct 
of the many. Autocracy may be the despotic mili- 
tarism of Prussia, an aristocracy of titles and land, 
or a plutocracy. Whatever its form its substance 
is the same and its ultimate effect upon men malefi- 
cent, however kindly and paternalistic its intent. 

§5 
If the ideals of democracy are increasingly to de- 
termine the relations of states and nations one with 
another, something in the nature of an international 
court to which the smaller peoples may appeal for 
justice against the aggressions of more powerful na- 
tions is a first requisite. The Hague Court was a ten- 
tative essay in this direction but was of small practical 
value by reason of its powerlessness to enforce de- 
cisions. The League to Enforce Peace, which seems 
a likelihood at the conclusion of the present war, 
bears in its very name better promise of success. 
Regrettable though it may be, force is still essential 
to the maintenance of law and order in society, both 
in the state and in the realm of international affairs. 
The time has not yet come to dispense with it. But 
the time has certainly come when force should be 
made subservient to justice and no longer be the 
weapon of national ambition over-riding the wishes 



54 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

and rights of weaker peoples. If the nations are re- 
garded for what they are, merely families of the 
world clan, or individual members of a single family, 
there is nothing startling in the conception of a court 
established by common consent and greater in power 
than any one of its members; a court to which the 
individual states delegate their powers and by whose 
decisions they agree to abide. 

As individuals each of us is subservient to law, be- 
fore which, ideally, we stand upon an equal footing. 
The citizen attacked by a bully appeals to it for pro- 
tection. That he could not, of his own might, resist 
the cowardly attack for which he seeks redress is the 
very cause of the court's existence. The court as- 
sumes the equality of individuals before it not in their 
powers physical, mental, or moral but in their right to 
safety and the pursuit of happiness. They are equal 
as souls. And it is in the terms of this abstract equal- 
ity that nations must be judged before the bar of an 
international court. The nation that by reason of 
its size or arrogance encroaches upon its neighbour 
can base no defence upon the old maxim that might 
is right. Nor can it safely be permitted to swagger, 
gun on hip, through the public streets. It is the func- 
tion of the police, whether municipal or international, 
to disarm ruffians, the function of the court to mete 
out punishment, the function of religion, education, 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 55 

and moral example to reform them and lead them to a 
better way of life. 

The degree of domestic interference which should 
be permitted a court cannot easily be defined. Fam- 
ily affairs and domestic quarrels we are inclined to 
leave alone unless they intrude so violently upon the 
peace and comfort of neighbours that they are deemed 
a public nuisance. Then we call for the police. We 
do not individually interfere, for we feel incompe- 
tent to the task. A dispassionate tribunal is essen- 
tial to the adjudication of the issues. The interfer- 
ing neighbour whose nerves have been set on edge, 
or to whose interest it is that the dispute should be 
settled in one way rather than another, is not the 
proper person to decide the case. The analogy of 
this generalized instance to the recent revolution in 
Mexico and the conduct of the United States is ob- 
vious. The United States was too close a neighbour, 
her interests too deeply involved, to interfere. But 
had there been a competent international court, Mex- 
ico's case should have been passed upon in short 
order and she forced to a more neighbourly manner 
of living. 

If we pursue the analogy of the domestic court 
to an international court a step farther, it would seem 
only sensible to grant the league of nations, as repre- 
sented in their tribunal, control of the seas and all 



56 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

highways necessary to free intercommunication, per- 
mitting all nations equal rights thereto. A highroad 
is free to all, subject to regulations essential to its 
proper use. If necessary it is policed. There is also 
a further extension of this right of free communica- 
tion. One possessed of a piece of property com- 
pletely surrounded by land owned by others has 
nevertheless the right of access to it. Otherwise it 
would be largely valueless to him, for he would be 
completely dependent upon his neighbour's goodwill 
and sense of justice. What then of Poland, Servia, 
the small states which may perhaps be formed from 
the disintegration of Austria? And what of Ger- 
many in need of a port upon warm water and of a 
trade route through the Balkans to the Levant? Why 
should these legitimate needs be denied? Railroads 
and docking privileges at the most desirable seaports, 
and these free from tariffs and unjust exactions, could 
be granted all inland countries were the principles of 
common justice as they have been developed in civ- 
ilized countries extended to international relations. 

These first steps for the establishment of better 
international relations demand no radical departures 
from the principles of common justice proved prac- 
ticable in hundreds of years of human intercourse. 
That they should seem at all novel to us is a com- 
mentary upon the archaic system of international 
relations as we have hitherto known it. The citizen's 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 57 

rights, his personal freedom, the protection he enjoys, 
have grown immensely during the last two centuries. 
But international relations have not so changed. The 
attitude of states one to another is still mediaeval. 
Its nearest parallel in domestic conditions would be, 
perhaps, the relations of the barons in England in the 
"troublesome reign of King John." England was 
then a group of virtually independent baronies, earl- 
doms, and duchies incessantly at war and requiring 
a strong overlord to bring them to law and order and 
permit industry to develop and commerce to flow 
freely. This is much the international condition and 
need today. 

A yet more suggestive parallel because economic — 
and the root of our present international rivalry and 
suspicion is largely economic — is the state of the Ger- 
man principalities and kingdoms previous to the 
formation of the customs union which paved the way 
to the establishment of the empire. Every kingdom, 
duchy, and free city exacted its toll from merchandise 
carried through it from a seaport to an inland destina- 
tion. This condition of affairs was intolerable, for 
it stifled economic life and industrial development. 
Upon the removal of these economic barriers and the 
virtual creation of Germany as an industrial unit, she 
grew immediately in economic power. It is signifi- 
cant that this economic union preceded and was the 
direct cause of a closer political unign. And sim- 



58 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

ilar conditions and results may be observed in the 
early history of our own country. The intolerable 
economic conditions which prevailed under the Ar- 
ticles of Confederation led to our present constitu- 
tion, under which Congress, though granted restricted 
powers in many respects, was permitted complete con- 
trol of customs duties and all interstate commerce. 

Thought of as an economic unit, every part of 
which is in some degree dependent upon other and 
alien parts, the world presents today much the appear- 
ance of the thirteen original colonies prior to 1789, 
or Germany after the Napoleonic wars. Tariffs and 
export duties, control of trade routes and canals, Gib- 
raltar and Suez, are so many checks upon the free 
flow of commerce, so many stoppages in the arteries 
of the world. If the world is to become a place in 
which the nations stand upon an equal footing, indus- 
trially no less than politically, these checks must be 
done away with. These artificial barriers are relics 
of a primitive and selfish conception of the state, of 
the belief that a nation should profit at the expense 
of its neighbour. That individual states may profit 
by the accidents of situation or by the control of 
colonies and trade routes backed by military power is 
unhappily the case, but that every selfish gain so ex- 
acted is a net economic loss to the world is equally 
certain. Every delay and exaction making the inter- 
change of goods slow, difficult, and costly is an addi- 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 59 

tion to the original cost of the goods, so much lost 
from the working time of the world, and insofar an 
artificial check upon industry and the arts. A free 
circulation is essential to health alike in the indi- 
vidual, the nation, and the world.^ 

But tariffs, and the wealth and power which they 
give those nations most favoured by geographic posi- 
tion, capital, organization, and military fitness, are 
much more than checks upon the economic life of the 
world and a means to the inequitable distribution of 
the world's wealth. They are a direct cause of inter- 
national strife. A recent instance of this fact is of- 
fered in the case of the present war of which one of 
the underlying causes was a highly discriminatory 
trade treaty forced by Germany upon Russia during 
the Russo-Japanese war, a treaty which benefitted 
Germany greatly at Russia's expense. Provisions of 
this treaty protecting the German farmer from the 
importation of Russian agricultural products demark 
a segment of the vicious circle of trade wars and im- 
perial ambitions. German farmers, tilling poor soil 
under adverse economic conditions, were subsidized 
in order that Germany, in time of war, might be able 
to feed her people from her own produce. German 

1 President Wilson's advocacy of the removal of tariff barriers 
— a purpose which has aroused much uneasiness among the capital- 
istic class in this country — promises to make the economic causes of 
war an important consideration in the negotiations for a permanent 
peace. 



60 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

foresight has been justified in the event. German 
blindness in forcing an unjust treaty upon Russia and 
in strengthening German manufactures at the expense 
of the Russian farmer made Russia, needlessly, her 
enemy. More than this, the German policy and all 
similar policies which foster industries and agricul- 
ture under adverse natural conditions, are the cause 
of an economic loss to mankind. The German farm- 
ers would better have engaged in some other occupa- 
tion and imported their grain from Russia where it 
could be more profitably and easily grown. 

Were the world an economic unit under the direc- 
tion of a single expert, Mr. Hoover perhaps, it is easy 
to imagine him issuing his decrees and planning the 
maximum yield for the minimum of effort expended. 
Argentine, Canada, Russia, and the United States 
might perhaps be commanded to grow sufficient wheat 
and beef cattle to supply the world's need. The 
Scandinavian countries, the United States, and the 
countries bordering the Andes would be made the 
manufacturing centres of the world for all mineral 
products by reason of their mines and cheap water 
power. Cotton would be spun and woven chiefly in 
the Appalachian highlands. To each part of the 
world would be assigned that portion of the world's 
industry to which it was best suited by reason of sit- 
uation, raw materials, transportation facilities and the 
like. The problem is, of course, vastly more compli- 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 61 



cated in fact than this Utopian solution indicates, 
for the world's population is not distributed in accord- 
ance with the best possible economic development. 
In countries such as England, Germany, and Holland 
it is too dense. In Australia, parts of Africa and the 
United States it is too sparse. This uneven distribu- 
tion is largely the result of the artificial conditions 
which natural barriers, tariffs, and national rivalries 
and ambitions have fostered. But were the world in 
the hands of a dictator a first consideration would be 
the redistribution of the world's population in accord- 
ance with economic needs. 

The pressure of population, due to racial division, 
national rivalries, geographical barriers, tariffs, and 
similar natural or artificial causes, is a permanent 
source of international friction and a root cause of 
the present war. Consequent upon its industrial ex- 
pansion fostered by the government's policy of sub- 
sidizing manufactories and establishing trade and 
technical schools, the wealth of Germany permitted a 
vast increase of population while at the same time 
the scale of living was raised. But Germany is a 
small country to house sixty millions of people and 
the pressure has been increasingly felt, expressing 
itself in Germany's attempt to gain colonies oversea. 
Her success has been small, for the unappropriated 
parts of the globe have proved largely uninhabitable 
to white men. England, similarly situated indus- 



62 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

trially, has drawn off much of her surplus population 
to her prosperous colonies. Germany, balked in her 
attempts elsewhere, has attempted, therefore, to ex- 
pand to the southeast, centering her ambitions in Asia 
Minor, a region offering both markets and, if scien- 
tifically developed, a home for a dense white popula- 
tion. 

The alternative to such overflow of population and 
seizure of colonies is periodic war wherein the excess 
male population is killed off and, in the German 
philosophy, the warlike spirit of the race thereby 
maintained. In practice Germany has resorted to 
both expedients in her efforts both to relieve pressure 
at home and to acquire imperial power. And in so 
doing Germany has followed the practice of the white 
race throughout history, though of late the expansion 
of the white man has been at the expense chiefly of the 
black and yellow peoples. The colonization of the 
Americas has meant in part the destruction and in 
part the absorption of the Indian. The Bushman 
and the Maori are all but extinct, and in South Africa 
those regions best suited to white settlement have 
been largely cleared of their original inhabitants. 
The white man has not always resorted to slaughter 
to demonstrate his superior fitness to rule. His vices 
and diseases, the changed conditions of life which 
his coming forces upon native peoples, have usually 
been suflRcient to clear his path for him. Whiskey 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 63 

and small pox are more deadly than the repeating 
rifle. 

Pressure of population and the need of colonies 
are not, however, problems peculiar to the white race. 
The yellow race, equally tenacious, fertile, and con- 
fident of its destiny, also needs room in which to grow. 
Japan, in Korea and Manchuria, is finding homes for 
the overflow of her people; the Chinese have spread 
along the Malay Peninsula and through the East In- 
dies. Had they not been excluded they would have 
colonized Australia and the Pacific slope of the United 
States. 

The white and yellow races face the problem of 
acquiring sufficient and suitable lands for the main- 
tenance of an evergrowing population or of limiting 
their populations to the resources which they now 
possess. Advances in agricultural science permit, to 
be sure, ever denser and self-sufficing populations 
upon lands already occupied, but the growth in food 
supply cannot keep pace with the growth in numbers. 
There is a limit to the tillable soil and to its pro- 
ductivity. To human fertility unchecked by war, 
disease, or deliberate control, there is no limit. 
What, then, must be the outcome of this struggle for 
land? Either the world must persist in its present 
course, the fiercer races preying upon the weaker and 
when these are destroyed turning upon each other in 
a brute unending struggle, or more intelligent methods 



64 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

must guide man in his adaptation to his environment. 
Man has thus far obeyed his brute instincts. He has 
now to demonstrate his possession of a higher intel- 
ligence wherewith to guide his destiny. 

Happily the world does not lack its object lessons 
proving national control of population feasible. For 
a considerable time previous to the present war the 
population of France had grown so slowly as to be 
regarded as virtually static. The fact has been cited 
by many as a proof not of French intelligence and 
national self-sufficiency but of degeneracy — on the 
analogy, doubtless, that the fertile guinea pig is in 
some mysterious way superior to the less procreant 
elephant. The correspondence of population in 
France to the means of economic support is a demon- 
stration not of degeneracy — and we hardly needed 
the heroic proofs France has offered in the war to 
convince us of her vitality — but of her wisdom, her 
self-control, her concern for the true welfare of her 
people. She is one nation that proves colonies and 
imperial growth unnecessary and unintelligent. In 
Holland, likewise, we find an analogous situation, 
knowledge of the means to birth control and its prac- 
tice being encouraged by the government. 

Sooner or later the world must follow the examples 
of France and Holland if human existence is to re- 
main tolerable to highly intelligent and moral beings. 
The time may be postponed if our ethical code per- 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 65 

mits a continuance of the world-old practice of de- 
stroying the weaker races and seizing their lands. It 
is even remote if intelligent effort is put forth to re- 
claim and colonize the subarctic regions, the tropical 
jungles, and the deserts, all of which may be made 
habitable by the exercise of international co-operation 
and scientific knowledge. Ultimately, however, the 
necessity of a static population the world over must 
be met; and in China, Germany, England, and other 
densely populated areas it should be met now if ur- 
gent social problems are to be solved and if interna- 
tional relations are to rise to a plane above that of 
feudalism or tribal warfare. 

In the settlement of the issues raised by this war 
the problem of population has immediately to do 
with the disposition of colonies inhabited chiefly by 
the black, yellow, and brown races. Is the world to 
continue its policy of seizure and extermination — 
deliberate or involuntary — or are the subject peoples, 
in the light of a higher morality, to be considered as 
wards of an international court, and their continuance 
and welfare looked after? Ethnologists assure us 
that there is no such thing as an inferior people, eth- 
nologically speaking, and that though they differ 
widely at present in degree of culture and civilization, 
the intellectual potentialities of brown, white, and yel- 
low men are the same. Some doubt is cast upon the 
black man's claim to equal standing; but it is at most 



66 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

only a doubt, and largely weakened by the evidences 
of the negro's intellectual and moral development un- 
der favourable conditions. 

We must, then, regard the peoples of the earth as 
equal in their possibilities if not in their present at- 
tainments. They have, moreover, their individual 
contributions to make to the world's morality, philos- 
ophy, and art. If our scientific achievements con- 
tribute to the welfare and culture of the Japanese and 
Chinese, no less have their art, religion, and philos- 
ophy already enriched European thought and cul- 
ture. In our arrogance, we of the white race, because 
of our greater fierceness which has enabled us to con- 
quer a large part of the earth, assume our superiority 
to all other races. We should not forget that the edu- 
cated Chinese and Japanese look with contempt upon 
our material philosophy and our lust for power. 
They see in our fierce pale eyes and sharp noses a 
likeness to the birds of prey with "beaks that rend 
and tear." Are they not justified in their contempt? 

The higher international morality demands, then, 
in the solution of the problem of colonies, that we 
consider the preferences and prejudices of those gov- 
erned. If we exclude the Chinese coolie from our 
shores, it is only just that the Chinese exclude Ameri- 
can capital and commercial adventurers if they find it 
to their interest to do so. If democracy implies 
equality and is to hold among nations as among indi- 



INTERNATIONAL RELA TIONS 67 

viduals, there cannot be two laws, one for the white 
race and another for the rest of the world. And in 
the international council which is, we hope, to initiate 
joint control of international problems, preserve the 
peace, and keep open the avenues of trade, the voice 
of other nations should be as potent as our own. 
Democracy among the peoples of the world, as among 
individuals, demands the surrender of privilege born 
of blood, or tradition, or might. The world can never 
achieve a genuine democracy until the white race 
drop all pretence to superiority and a divine right 
to rule. If they demonstrate their superiority, mental, 
moral, or spiritual, the leadership of the world will 
be theirs even under conditions which inhibit physical 
domination. If they fail to demonstrate their supe- 
riority, the leadership of the world will pass to those 
races more deserving of it. 

The League to Enforce Peace, as the first of the 
international institutions to take over the government 
of the world, should, then, both for political expe- 
diency and as a proof of its moral right to the func- 
tion it assumes, reassure the little peoples and the 
subject races that they are truly wards of the court 
and that their welfare is the concern of the Powers. 
They should be assured of the right to self-govern- 
ment, freedom from aggression, and aided to develop 
the culture and civilization peculiar to them. India, 
Poland, Servia, Belgium and the rest, without the Alps 



68 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

and a citizenry trained to the use of arms, would then 
take such a place as Switzerland now holds among the 
nations, independent and respected. 

But this political freedom and the right of self-gov- 
ernment are not enough. Economic freedom is more 
vital than autonomy. A free Servia denied a sea- 
port or with the markets of Austria closed to her 
would not be truly free, free, that is, to prosper and 
develop a complex domestic economy. Tariff bar- 
riers are as effective as arms in keeping the weaker 
peoples in subjection. The danger, at the conclusion 
of the war, is not so much that political tyranny will 
continue and grow — for the costliness and futility of 
it will be fresh in all men's minds — but that the na- 
tions will endeavour to recoup their losses by profit- 
able trade alliances and the exploitation of weaker 
peoples. China, especially, with her vast resources 
and cheap labour, invites aggression. Japan, nearest 
of the great powers, is seizing her opportunity to pre- 
empt economic privileges in China, but once the war is 
over other powers will attempt to gain their share. 
Japanese aggression like German aggression must 
give way before a wiser and more righteous interna- 
tional morality and China be helped to stand on her 
own feet and realize her destiny. 

Nor will it be either just or politic to discriminate 
against Germany and make her the victim of trade 
wars. To do so would be dangerous, for Germany 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 69 



so abused would prepare herself for future wars; the 
hatred, which will be the heritage of this war, would 
not be permitted to die. Moreover, the world, in any 
such trade alliance excluding the importation of Ger- 
man products, would lose the great benefit of German 
skill and technical efficiency in the manufacturing 
arts. And these are amongst the assets of the world 
from which all peoples should profit. Freedom to 
pursue the arts of peace and to exchange commodities 
no less than ideas must be the basis of any interna- 
tional union which is to endure and not be periodically 
subject to the menace of war. 

That all tariff barriers the world over should be at 
one stroke removed is doubtless impracticable under 
existing conditions. Populations and industries are 
now artificially distributed, not to the ultimate eco- 
nomic welfare of the world as a whole but in accord- 
ance with a muhitude of factors which are the product 
of chance and calculation: of artificial restrictions 
and stimuli, of subsidies and discriminating tariffs, 
of technical education and efficiency, of varying stand- 
ards of living, and of racial animosities and hostile 
alliances. It would not be easy to turn at once to a 
freer and saner economic order, one in which indus- 
trial development is fostered in strict response to the 
needs of a particular population, or the industrial 
workers of the world are so distributed as best to meet 
the needs of the world as a whole. To remove all 



70 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

tariffs would be to repeat the industrial confusion 
subsequent upon the introduction of power machinery 
in the north of England at the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century. Fundamental changes of this sort 
must needs be made slowly and in accordance with 
some international plan. A plan so comprehensive 
demands a more closely knit international organiza- 
tion than we can hope for in the immediate future. 
Yet it would be but a logical outgrowth of the League 
to Enforce Peace. It and the power to enforce it 
must ultimately come if the world is to know the final 
destruction of national rivalries. Such a develop- 
ment demands, however, the internal reorganization 
of the chief industrial nations, and of this I shall have 
more to say in the next chapter. 

A single instance of the difficulty to be encountered 
in the removal of tariff barriers and the reorganiza- 
tion of industry upon a world basis is manifest in the 
differing standards of living which prevail among the 
various peoples. If those peoples among whom a low 
standard of living now prevails were permitted to 
flood the world with the products of their factories, 
as would be the case were tariffs removed and the 
present unregulated system of capitalistic production 
allowed to continue, China, Japan, and India might 
rapidly become the manufacturing centres of the 
world. The industrial populations of the United 
States and Germany, which have lived upon protected 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 71 



industries, would then, to a great extent, be thrown 
out of employment. England, a free-trading nation, 
would be in better case, though under these condi- 
tions the standard of living of her industrial workers, 
already too low, could hardly be improved. Eco- 
nomic freedom the world over, with its incalculable 
benefits in reducing the cost of commodities to all, 
demands for its realization that standards of living 
be virtually uniform throughout the world. 

The cost of transporting goods from countries so 
remote as Japan modifies somewhat the necessity of 
equalizing the standards of living of Oriental and Oc- 
cidental countries but does not materially affect the 
problem. The question of "dumping," whereby goods 
are sold cheaper abroad than at home — a fruitful 
cause of international friction as has been pointed out 
by economists — is a further complication. But this, 
too, like the standard of living is only in part an 
international question. It has to do chiefly with the 
industrial organization of the individual nations and 
must be considered in tliat place. Only as the cap- 
italistic system within the various countries is so mod- 
ified as to permit a rising standard of living among 
the workers, and a uniform standard the world over, 
can the international problems of world production 
for world consumption be satisfactorily solved. We 
can premise at this point of the discussion only this: 
that wherever possible without too great dislocation 



72 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

of industry, present tariff barriers should be lowered 
or removed. And by no fatal selfishness should ad- 
ditional barriers be erected at this time to put further 
checks upon the free intercourse of peoples. 

§6 
This discussion of the economic implications of a 
world democracy in its international aspects has prob- 
ably been carried to a point sufficiently removed from 
immediate issues, those of the impending peace. 
There is enough of a program here to command the 
statesmanship, the clear thinking, and the unselfish- 
ness of nations for a long time to come. That much 
or all of it should ever be realized requires that di- 
plomacy such as we have known in the past be de- 
stroyed root and branch. Diplomacy has hitherto 
been an inhuman game played by nations each desir- 
ous of territorial or trade advantage at the expense 
of others. It is a survival of days which the morality 
of mankind has outgrown. It is secret and selfish. 
It does not spring from the formulated will of the 
peoples it is supposed to represent. In many na- 
tions it is the prerogative of a wealthy ruling class 
careless of war for which the people pay if thereby a 
small class may profit. For though to a nation such 
a war as the present costs more than a hundred years 
of foreign trade can repay, it may be both immedi- 
ately and ultimately profitable to a small class within 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 73 



the nation. The maintenance of peace demands that 
those who bear the cost of war have the decisive voice 
in international affairs. Only as the masses of the 
workers control their relations with kindred masses 
in other nations can the ideals common to all humanity 
find expression. War will not certainly cease even 
then, but that is the road of hope. 

The immediate duty of the citizen desirous of influ- 
encing even so little as he can the formulation of 
peace terms which will make for international justice 
and the growth of the democratic ideal, is to exact 
of his government the acceptance of the following 
principles: 

1. That diplomacy should be open and not secret. 
The workers, as those most vitally concerned, should 
have a determining voice in questions involving war 
and international economic policy. 

2. That autonomy be granted those peoples suf- 
ficiently homogeneous and advanced to give promise 
of managing their affairs with a fair degree of suc- 



cess. 



3. That weak or subject peoples, whether now nom- 
inally independent or governed as colonies, be prom- 
ised ultimate autonomy; when, that is to say, they give 
strong evidence of their capacity therefor. Mean- 
while that they be assured of protection against the 
aggression of stronger states, both military and eco- 
nomic, 



74 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

4. That a league to enforce peace be established, 
its objects to insure the freedom of the seas, interna- 
tionally policed, the limitation of armaments, and the 
substitution of enforced arbitration for an appeal to 
arms in all questions of dispute between the contract- 
ing nations. 

5. That the large nations agree to refrain from 
exploiting the weaker peoples to their own advantage. 
That they open up trade routes accessible to all na- 
tions. That they give every inland nation access to 
the sea and if possible a port on ice-free water. That 
they refrain from trade alliances and international 
agreements designed to profit a few nations at the 
expense of others. That they offer Germany and 
Austria an equal place with others in the community 
of nations upon evidence that these two have re- 
nounced imperial and militaristic ambitions. 

It is the realization of some such program as this 
that must be the declared object of all the Allies, not 
of one or two, only, nor of a minority group, if out of 
the tragic misery and destruction of this war some 
little good may come. Unless the world, with quick- 
ened conscience, with magnanimity for the van- 
quished, and with greater unselfishness than nations 
have ever before displayed, improves this opportunity 
to establish a better purpose and understanding among 
the nations, the sacrifices of the young, the strong, of 
those with ideals and the courage to die for them^ will 



INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 75 

have been in vain. It remains for the world in the 
coming peace and thereafter to demonstrate that ideal- 
ism and the hope of a true democracy did not perish 
with the young men upon the battlefields of France. 



Ill 

THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 

If the participation of the United States in the pres- 
ent war proves long and costly, the administrative 
reorganization of our government necessary to meet 
the demands for food and munitions will revolution- 
ize industry in its relation to political machinery. 
Even if our participation is neither long nor costly 
it must have considerable influence upon our future 
industrial and political methods, for we shall learn 
not only from it but also from the wider experience 
of England and France, our allies. Neither of these 
nations can return to the loose relationship of govern- 
ment to industry that prevailed prior to the wan 
Democratic theory, with its insistence upon individual 
rights, has hitherto minimized the function of the 
state. Only grudgingly and in the stress of war has 
it yielded to governmental interference in industrial 
relations to prevent conflicts between capital and 
labour, to control food prices, and to establish proper 
relations between landlord and tenant. In the sev- 
enty-five years preceding, the long struggle in the 
English parliament for factory legislation regulating 

7e 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 11 

hours, conditions of work, the employment of women 
and children, and similar problems bears witness to 
the slow yielding of the laissez faire principle to the 
necessities of industrial change under modern condi- 
tions of life. 

The war has accelerated the inevitable change. 
Factory workers have been mobilized no less than sol- 
diers; hours, pay, and working conditions have passed 
under governmental control; war-time profits have 
been appropriated by the state; food prices and the 
distribution of foods are determined by administra- 
tive officers. Necessity has forced these innovations. 
In no other way has it been possible to combat effec- 
tively the efficient autocracy of Germany. And the 
lessons in co-operation so taught, the realization that 
the lives and wealth of its citizens are at the disposal 
of the state for the welfare of all, will not be for- 
gotten with the return of peace. It will be impossible 
to return to the old unregulated competitive con- 
ditions. It seems incredible that food supplies 
should ever again be controlled by speculators, or 
the necessaries of life made the basis of monopoly 
profits. 

The war will have taught the democratic states the 
necessity of a strong central government which shall 
control the domestic economy of its people. A di- 
vorce of political and economic functions will be 
recognized as no longer practicable, for it is costly 



78 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

and wasteful, and permits a lowering of the efficiency 
of the workers. In a time of national danger it is 
suicidal, demanding a rapid and necessarily awkward 
reorganization of the state's administrative machin- 
ery. A return to the conditions that prevailed prior 
to the war will be impossible either in England or 
France. It will not be wholly possible in the United 
States. In our own country no less than abroad we 
may expect a growth in the powers of the government, 
a closer co-ordination of political and economic func- 
tions. But the nature of that government, whether 
more or less democratic than it has been hitherto, we 
must determine. 

For it is quite an unwarranted assumption that this 
war, fought ostensibly in the cause of democracy, will 
result in greater domestic liberty for the victors. 
German militarism and autocracy may be crushed, 
for their menace is clear, while within our own bor- 
ders the autocracy we know may in nowise be weak- 
ened, may even be strengthened. We do not fear 
sufficiently that the forces of autocracy may learn 
their lessons from the war and with a realization of 
the increased power and profit possible under a highly 
centralized system of economic control seek to utilize 
the improved machinery of government for the fur- 
therance of their own ends. War, with its irksome 
burdens for the many, always profits a few despite 
taxes and supertaxes. Vast businesses will be built 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 79 

up by the war and others strengthened. Upon the 
return of peace, the industries so organized will 
be diverted to the conquest of the nation's markets. 
If industrial conditions are henceforth to be increas- 
ingly subject to governmental control it will be the 
object of big business to be the determining power in 
that control. 

The history of democracy in the United States 
makes the truth of this prediction self evident. De- 
mocracy with us has been an ideal too often illusory, 
too seldom a reality even in its narrowest political 
sense. The framers of the Constitution, despite their 
pious generalizations about liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity, distrusted the people. The central govern- 
ment, checked in its grasp by reason of the power 
granted the individual states; Congress, the President, 
the Supreme Court with each its check upon the 
others; and the representative system itself with its 
indirect method of electing senators and the Presi- 
dent; and most of all the rigid amending clause of 
the Constitution — all these restrictions are evidences 
of the distrust in which the minority who framed the 
Constitution held the common people. Their aim 
was to establish a republic, not a democracy. 

Since 1789 American history has been one long 
struggle between two forces: the one conservative, 
aristocratic in its sympathies, and economically pow- 
erful, seeking to maintain our institutions as they 



80 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

were established; the other, democratic, radical, and 
economically dependent, seeking to make our political 
institutions more representative of the will of the peo- 
ple, to weaken the selfish influence of wealth and 
privilege upon Congress in its creation of laws, the 
President in their execution, and the Supreme Court 
in their interpretation. Much of this effort we now 
see to have been misdirected, for the people, distrust- 
ful of a government which was not directly responsive 
to their interests, sought not to make it both more 
powerful and more responsible but to restrict its func- 
tions, jealously clinging to state prerogatives which, 
with the development of nation-wide business, proved 
of little genuine worth. To their bewilderment they 
learned soon that the possession of a vote was no 
guarantee of popular government. The party system, 
the boss, the use of wealth to determine elections, and 
not least the subsidizing of the legal profession by 
the landed and industrial interests — predicted by De 
Tocqueville — all these went far to make the freeman 
possessed of a vote politically impotent save as, in 
national crises, an outraged public opinion overrode 
for a brief period the professional politician. 

Democracy has undoubtedly won its occasional vic- 
tories, but our political experiences have also made 
many of us cynical of popular government. Thou- 
sands of Americans will not vote because to do so they 
regard as a waste of time; they say of every public 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 81 

man, however patriotic, that he has been bought, that 
all politicians and all parties are tarred with the same 
brush. We are so distrustful of our representatives 
in Congress that we regard them mostly as a joke, and 
few highly intelligent men of independent mind would 
take a seat in Congress were it offered them. And 
withal we wonder by what dispensation of Providence 
we have had, on the whole, such able presidents, who 
have contrived to force an incompetent, indolent, and 
often corrupt Congress to something resembling effi- 
cient legislation. 

The force that has retarded the progress of democ- 
racy has been commingled of privilege, wealth, and 
honest conservatism, good and bad alike taking ad- 
vantage of the defects in our political machinery 
and the existence of a class of professional poli- 
ticians recruited mainly from the law, to thwart the 
popular will desirous of making political institutions 
minister to the economic wellbeing of the masses. 
Often this popular will has not been articulate, has 
not known the cause of the economic burdens which 
it has borne. The educated and monied classes have 
profited from this fact and failed to make clear the 
needs of those less fortunate or less intelligent than 
themselves. For this is the obligation of privilege 
and intelligence in a democracy no less than in any 
other form of government. No democracy that has 
been or ever will be can make men equal in intelli- 



82 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

gence. There must always be intellectual leaders to 
interpret the needs of the many in order that those 
needs may be satisfied. Whenever the favoured 
classes slight this duty of leading and interpreting, 
then will the government inevitably more truly repre- 
sent the desire of the few than the needs of the masses. 
This has too largely been the case in the United 
States since our establishment as a nation, nor do 
we differ therein from other pseudo-democratic peo- 
ples. The disproportionate influence upon legisla- 
tion exerted by propertied interests is no phenomenon 
peculiar to our day. But the recognition of the fact 
and its bearing upon the social problems of a nation 
rapidly transformed from an agricultural to a com- 
plex industrial state is recent. Property interests 
are also larger and more powerful than once, more 
conscious of their common purpose, more aware of 
the growing definiteness of the demands put upon 
tliem by the working classes, demands which prop- 
erty regards as inimical to its welfare. Commercial 
and manufacturers' associations are organized to op- 
pose organized labour and national regulation of in- 
dustry. The contest, if no diff'erent essentially from 
what it once was, is now sharper and intellectually 
more selfaware. That government will increasingly 
occupy itself with the regulation of industry is ap- 
parent. Hence the concern of the vested interests to 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 83 

make that interference innocuous to those already in 
the saddle. 

Yet to many good Americans, such a belief as I 
have expressed will seem wildly exaggerated if not 
downright untrue. It is yet a common belief that 
ours is a land of boundless opportunity, that with ax 
and gun and plough and oxen one may yet go into the 
wilderness and become independent. The wilderness 
has gone save as a place for recreation; there is no 
longer a frontier. The new lands to come under cul- 
tivation are reclaimed by irrigation and drainage, the 
old lands restored through the use of fertilizers and 
the application of scientific agricultural methods — 
requiring, that is to say, some capital and consider- 
able education. My grandfather in 1840 bought gov- 
ernment land in Illinois at one dollar and a quarter 
an acre, land that sells now for two hundred dollars. 
He gave his hired men a quarter section after a term 
of service and their descendants are substantial citi- 
zens today. 

The intelligent young men who have been pouring 
into this country from Russia during the last fifteen 
years have not found our land to be what we like to 
think it. Nor do they see it through such rosy spec- 
tacles as those of Mary Antin in her "Promised Land." 
For one highly intelligent Russian boy writes that, 
contriving through vast hardship to come to America, 



84 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

the land of opportunity, to secure an education de- 
nied him in Russia, he found that "opportunity is not 
for the immigrant. Instead of the university I faced 
the sweatshop." Then for him followed years of toil 
by day in order that he might go to night school. Ul- 
timately he attained his ambition and came to college, 
granted, and with an appreciation of its opportunities 
such as few native-bom Americans possess. Granted, 
too, that America, compared with the Russia of the 
old regime, knows no racial or caste distinctions. 
There is still, however, little of that equality of oppor- 
tunity upon which we pride ourselves. Only the 
fittest survive, those with the strongest nerves and 
bodies. The weaker, no less ambitious perhaps, fill 
the consumptive wards of our hospitals or remain, of 
necessity, in sweatshop and factory. 

For men of genius or of financial and administra- 
tive talent opportunity for advancement exists in all 
countries. Aristocracy renews its strength from 
these in Germany, in Russia, and in England. In 
England, where caste and property are more powerful 
than in America, a man may yet win a peerage by 
brewing beer, exploiting the possibilities of "yellow 
journalism," or attaining a success in politics or by 
his pen. For the exceptional man there is oppor- 
tunity under any conditions of life. But this is a far 
different thing from opportunity for those of mediocre 
talents who must constitute the vast majority of every 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 85 

nation. If democracy is to mean opportunity for 
every one we must revise our conception of it to mean 
this: that every man, easily and freely have access to 
that place in the world which he is best fitted to fill; 
and that in this place he be given the means to main- 
tain himself and his family in comfort and with op- 
portunity for wholesome recreation and the realiza- 
tion of his best mental and spiritual possibilities. 
Democracy has never meant so much as this in any 
land or time, in our own favoured land little more 
than another. 

Equality of opportunity in the sense in which we 
usually employ the term would mean, if it meant 
anything, that we should all be well born, inheriting 
strong bodies free from defect; that we should be well 
nourished; that we should be equally well educated. 
But were all these conditions realized there would 
still be, in a competitive society, room at the top for 
a few only. Some must serve and do the manual 
toil of the world. And we have either to accept, for 
the mass, a condition of servitude such as exists or 
so to revise our industrial system that those who toil 
may enjoy some of the material benefits which are 
now monopolized by the few. If we permit present 
conditions to continue in a more highly centralized 
industrial state such as impends, with a society more 
firmly stratified than now, let us not call our system 
a democracy. Equality at the polls will mean little 



86 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

without a genuine equality of influence in the man- 
agement of our institutions, industrial no less than 
political. 

We shall assume, then, that democracy connotes 
equality and freedom, economic no less than political, 
and it may be well to point out more specifically 
wherein even political democracy, in the narrow 
sense, is impossible unless based upon economic se- 
curity. Intimidation of voters whose jobs and wages 
are dependent upon the will of their employers is 
probably not extensive, for our system of the secret 
ballot makes it uncertain. But there are more effi- 
cacious methods. The tlireat that the factory will 
close its doors if this or another candidate is elected 
or if the free traders get into power and lower the 
tariff, is intimidation also. The workers should not, 
of course, be deceived, should not be coerced by lies 
and economic fallacies. But the fact remains that 
they are so coerced and, even if suspecting motives and 
arguments, lean to the safe side, fearful of hazarding 
their jobs and wages. Economic questions are diffi- 
cult at best, and it is not surprising that workers yield 
to the influence of those in a position to harm them. 
But are such in command of a free vote? Obviously 
not. They are driven to the polls, as to their daily 
tasks, by a complex of influences over which they have 
no control and of which they have no clear understand- 
ing. Their votes are not free nor are they of equal 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 87 

weight to the votes of the intelligent and independent 
citizens who select their candidates and measures un- 
influenced by economic pressure. Political freedom 
demands an economic independence that is safe from 
influence and intimidation; which is intelligent by- 
reason of adequate education and opportunity for 
thought; which is open to intelligent guidance from 
disinterested sources. In this sense, political free- 
dom is rare. 

It need scarcely be pointed out that, despite our 
democratic theories, men are unequal before the law. 
The law is on the side of him who can secure the most 
expert counsel to plead his case, and skilled lawyers 
command large fees. Moreover, in civil suits the 
poor man is less able to pay the price of the law's 
delays; his means and patience are worn out before 
those of his wealthier adversary and he has the choice 
of dropping his case or pursuing it to what, at best, 
can be only an empty victory. This condition of 
aff'airs is recognized in our common saying that "there 
is one law for the rich and another for the poor." 
The legal aid societies established to assist the poor 
in securing justice, and the movement for the reform 
of our legal procedure all bear witness to the inequal- 
ities which exist. Yet democracy must mean that the 
law shall be free to all and all on a basis of true 
equality before it. 

In whatsoever direction we turn the same truth is 



88 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

manifest: that democracy has little practical meaning 
if political freedom is divorced from economic inde- 
pendence. That complete democracy would imply 
complete economic equality, that is to say, equality of 
income is, I believe, a logical deduction. But this is 
a consummation sufficiently remote and need not con- 
cern us now. Our immediate need is to make our 
country more democratic than it now is in order that 
we may safely permit the establishment of a more 
powerful and highly centralized government than we 
have hitherto known and take our proper place in a 
league of democratic states. For democracy at home 
is essential to international democracy. The small 
nations, the weak and subject peoples, will fare ill at 
our hands, if our democracy is not economic as well 
as political, practical as well as theoretical. We 
have, therefore, the task of limiting the power of 
wealth individually and corporately held, devoted, 
that is, to the privilege of the few rather than to the 
good of the many. And we have also to attack our 
problem from the other end, to raise the standard of 
living among the workers by fixing a high minimum 
wage, making employment secure, and insuring them 
against accident, disease, and old age. In short we 
must fit them for the acquisition and exercise of that 
political power now fondly but mistakenly attributed 
to them. 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 89 

§2 
That the growing disparity of wealth in the United 
States is not only harmful to the rich in the power 
which it gives divorced of any true sense of social 
responsibility, and to the poor in the envy and class 
hatred which it fosters, but that it is also modifying 
the very spirit of Americanism, a slight acquaintance 
with our country will show. It was not many years 
ago that a freebom white American scorned a tip. 
To take a tip would have been the admission of in- 
feriority, and he thought himself as good as another. 
In the larger cities, in the lanes of tourist travel, in 
resorts and hotels — wherever wealth comes in con- 
tact with service — few men will now refuse a tip, 
though many will reserve the right of hating those 
they exploit. The chauffeur and the bell-boy, the 
barber, the porter, and the chambermaid all expect 
and demand tips whether for poor service or none. A 
tip, if justified at all, is only so on the theory that some 
special and efficient service has been rendered. In 
practice tipping makes all service bad and destroys 
the spirit of honest workmanship. The man whose 
position makes a tip essential to his livelihood, pre- 
serves his self-respect by scorning you and doing his 
work as negligently as he dare. It is the same spirit 
that leads the workman in his craft to give as little and 
as slovenly work as he can and hold his job. 



90 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

These are trivial instances, but I believe them sig- 
nificant of that change in the American spirit which 
class conflict and the growing disparity in wealth have 
brought about and are bringing about increasingly. 
The farther one gets from a life of complex industry 
and striking social contrasts the less of this servile and 
envious spirit he will find and the more of honest 
fellowship and workmanship. In the country one 
encounters human meanness and avarice as elsewhere 
but also more of the spirit of neighbourliness which 
gives friendly help with no expectation of return. 
And as one leaves the more densely settled and highly 
developed middle west and east and enters the thinly 
settled west, the more one will find of the older Amer- 
ican spirit of democracy, the naive belief that all men 
are equal, an absurd belief, perhaps, but a noble one. 

Jeff'ersonian democracy with its assumption of sim- 
plicity, Jacksonian democracy with its pretence that 
all men are equally fitted to hold office, are crude in 
many ways, are productive of Congressmen in Stetson 
hats logrolling for new postoffices and military posts 
in the midst of the prairies. Their uncouthness and 
flamboyant patriotism are patent. But in the condi- 
tions which produce them, in the electors "back 
home," there is something we are losing in America, 
a belief that all men are equal in the eyes of God, a 
belief concretely expressed in ways incompatible with 
good government, often enough, but a belief which 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 91 

produced Lincoln. That spiritual faith America 
must preserve and discipline to finer uses than once if 
she is to become a great and a free nation. A dis- 
ciplined democracy which can recognize wise and 
disinterested leadership and be guided by it while yet 
retaining its ancient faith that unequal as men are in 
powers they are equal in a mystical and religious 
sense because equally an expression of the spiritual 
force that animates the world — some such democracy 
we seek and perhaps may attain. It is because hu- 
man souls are not equally the concern of the state and 
because some have been completely neglected by it 
that the spirit of democracy has faltered. 

It may indeed be that democracy is incapable of 
choosing wise leaders, that it is unable to subject itself 
to self-imposed discipline, or to serve willingly un- 
der the guidance of men of vision. Perhaps, as 
Bernard Shaw has suggested, human beings in the 
present degree of their development are not wise 
enough to solve the difficult problems which our mod- 
ern world presents. But the only alternatives we know 
are autocracies which have failed and autocracies 
which, like that of Germany, have triumphed only at 
the cost of blood and servitude. Better that the 
human race should perish than that Germany's way 
prove the only way. And meanwhile we have the 
great hope that a democracy which is based both on 
economic and political freedom may ultimately solve 



92 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

its problems. Such a democracy has never existed 
on a scale sufficiently large or amid a world suf- 
ficiently hospitable to it to permit its survival. Com- 
munistic colonies have proved little save the existence 
of an unquenchable human desire for a better way 
of life. If the world is to become a finer and freer 
habitation for man, some experiment in world-wide 
socialism, communism — call it what you like, gov- 
ernment in which all participate equally for the equal 
good of all — must be attempted. And this is a fitting 
moment in the world's history in which to inaugurate 
the attempt. 

§3 
The most obvious means whereby to lessen the un- 
due disparity in wealth which now prevails is to con- 
tinue in times of peace the heavy tax upon large in- 
comes which has been levied as a war measure. If 
it is desirable, for the sake of principle, that every 
one should pay a tax, that on incomes no more than 
sufficient to maintain a comfortable standard of living 
— which I should place at four or five thousand dol- 
lars a year for men with families — should be nominal 
only; above that amount the tax should be increas- 
ingly heavy until all incomes in excess of one hun- 
dred thousand dollars were virtually confiscated. It 
is a recognized principle of modem taxation that the 
burden should fall most heavily upon those best able 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 93 

to pay. It should be increasingly recognized also 
that superlatively large incomes are a menace to 
society on the ground, simply, that few men are suf- 
ficiently wise to spend vast incomes without harm to 
themselves and to others. One hundred thousand 
dollars is an arbitrary figure but it seems to me 
sufficiently large more than to satisfy the legitimate 
wants of any human being. 

Heavy inheritance taxes are, however, a more vital 
need than a large income tax. Vast fortunes in- 
vested in land, railroads, and utility corporations, 
rolling up through sheer momentum, added to by 
wealthy marriages, and passing by inheritance under 
trust provisions which safeguard the properties, have 
already created an aristocracy of wealth in this coun- 
try. The phenomenon is so recent, the opportunities 
for acquiring great wealth so recently circumscribed, 
that we are scarcely yet aware that we have a prop- 
ertied class no less firmly established than that of 
England. It is our popular belief that it requires 
but three generations to pass "from shirt-sleeves to 
shirt-sleeves," that wealth accumulated by the grand- 
father is dissipated by the grandsons. This is but 
rarely the case. Well established wealth perpetuates 
itself with little personal guidance. It grows with the 
development of society and those who inherit it are 
as secure, as well able to found families, as are the 
landed aristocracies of Europe. Class envy and class 



94 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

warfare, so deprecated by our industrial and financial 
leaders, are created by the very solidity of the for- 
tunes which they establish, and with the passing of 
every decade the opportunity of the exceptional few 
to pass from the lower classes into the freer life of 
the wealthy — that "democracy of opportunity" upon 
which we pride ourselves — is lessened. 

The national confiscation of excessive weahh 
through income and inheritance ta?es, is moreover 
necessary to furnish the means whereby our tremen- 
dous social problems may be met and solved and the 
standard of living of our industrial classes materially 
increased. Poverty and disease are, in the main, 
social ills springing from the interplay of complex 
economic forces unregulated by the state. They 
must be eradicated if our social system is to be- 
come heahhy and our citizens competent to exercise 
the privileges of democratic government. Disease 
springs largely from poverty and ignorance, from 
bad housing, malnutrition, overcrowding, dangerous 
and unhealthful conditions of work — evils which can 
be eliminated by foresight and the expenditure of 
money. The nature of the problem, its cause and its 
remedy, is known, but the organization of forces nec- 
essary to its solution is only in its infancy. It is a 
national not a local problem and must be met by a 
strong centralized authority competent to deal with 
it in all its manifestations and devoting itself to that 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 95 

end. Such power demands the surrender of state and 
municipal prerogatives which are jealously guarded 
in times of peace. But in time of war the federal 
government overrides local jealousies and conserva- 
tisms, and the administrative machinery and powers 
so achieved can be perpetuated and directed to re- 
moter ends if the citizens have the wisdom to seize 
the opportunity and profit by their wartime experi- 
ence. 

Our social system presents an amusing or a de- 
pressing spectacle as one views it either with the 
eyes of the mind or the eyes of the heart. Its in- 
congruities and barbarities shriek at one from every 
side. To one awakened to its absurdities, every daily 
contact affords food for satire. Thus two incidents 
of an afternoon's trip in the mountains of North 
Carolina seemed to me typical of our topsy-turvy 
civilization, though in themselves commonplace 
enough. On a picturesque mountain road we passed 
a woman, lean, brown, wrinkled, of indeterminable 
age. She was seemingly returning home from some 
illicit "moonshine" still, for as we passed in the 
motor-car she shrieked in a drunken raucous voice, 
"Let 'er fly!" The contrast of the pleasure seekers, 
paying a stiff price to view the beauties of mountain 
scenery, and the mountain dweller whose greatest hap- 
piness lay in forgetting her darkened existence in 
drunkenness, seemed to me ironic. A little later we 



96 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

passed a wagon crawling homewards from town, 
drawn by a yoke of the little mountain cattle guided 
by a gaunt mountaineer. It was the same we had 
passed hours before when we set out on our journey. 
Meanwhile we had pleasurably and easily made a 
trip of forty miles, stopping when we chose to view 
the mountain laurel or a bend of the mountain stream 
dancing in its canyon bed. Surely the mountaineer 
driving to town with his load of wood and returning 
with his scant purchases should have driven the swift 
running motor-car while we crept behind the slow- 
paced oxen. 

These are trivial epsiodes, striking one with their 
significance because of some strangeness in the set- 
ting or because one is in the mood to see. Our rou- 
tine lives in cities offer more tragic contrasts which 
familiarity robs of their power to thrill. Children 
underfed and underclothed dying for lack of care 
and proper food, girls in the garment trades earn- 
ing less than six dollars a week, while in ultra-fash- 
ionable circles women spend thousands of dollars in 
a single year for clothes and millinery, are instances 
of those extremes which enflame the anarchist and 
provoke class hatred. A speculator may make in a 
single turn of the market a sum greater than the total 
earnings of a competent bank-clerk in a working life- 
time of fifty years. A man may "comer" wheat and 
from his fortune endow a university; may break a 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 97 

strike, secure government contracts for armour-plate, 
and endow libraries; may exploit the riches of the 
earth in oil-wells and coal-mines and support a thou- 
sand foreign missionaries. It is all quite as mad as 
the hatter's tea-party. We have our theories, to be 
sure, that great rewards are necessary if we are to 
tempt our entrepreneurs to confer upon us the vast 
social benefit of their enterprise. I wonder if any 
one really believes such theories. They are only a 
justification of things as they are, an explanation after 
the fact. 

The rich, who profit most from our social chaos, 
are also the victims of it. Self-defence provokes 
many a man in a financial comer to ruthless methods 
of which he is at heart ashamed. And wealth too 
often ruins those who inherit it, for in America there 
is no accompanying heritage of class obligation and 
social duty which to some extent has justified the ex- 
istence of aristocracies in other lands. How, indeed, 
an intelligent, well meaning, and scrupulous young 
man, heir to great wealth, could dispose of his in- 
come without injury to someone is more than I can 
tell. No matter how good his intentions he could 
never be sure that the help he gave here would not 
pauperize or debase elsewhere. The income he 
spends may be in part derived from the very social 
injustice he seeks to rectify. Charity is useless and 
debasing. The only remedy for the ills of our social 



98 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

system is social action, the state confiscating wealth 
and the services of men to the realization of a plan 
which deals comprehensively with disease, poverty, 
education, crime, and the standard of living of the 
entire nation. The efforts of individuals and insti- 
tutions can serve at best only to ameliorate the suf- 
fering; it cannot get to the root of the disease and 
effect a cure. 

These are truisms which the thinker and social 
worker have dinned into the unheeding ears of 
the world for half a century. My excuse for repeat- 
ing them here is that their relation to democracy 
at home and to that international democracy upon 
which the world pins its faith and hope of survival 
is not clear to everyone, nor the peculiar necessity of 
seeing that relationship at this particular moment 
realized. A fine idealism is being generated by the 
world-war, an idealism which for the moment out- 
weighs human selfishness. Men are giving their lives 
and their means to the service of their country. Out 
of the stress and necessity of the war a new ma- 
chinery fitted to the establishment of a new social 
order is coming into being. To make use of this 
idealism and machinery is our opportunity and duty 
as we endeavour to establish a better relationship 
among the nations and destroy the evil of autocracy. 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 99 

§ 4 
Thus far I have endeavoured to suggest briefly some 
of the inadequacies of our national democracy, for 
it is my conviction that the growth of a democratic 
internationalism must be accompanied by domestic 
reforms. National boundaries do not express the 
sole lines of cleavage in our modem world ; nor even 
perhaps, the deepest. Capitalism is not confined to 
a single state. It exists in all countries and its pur- 
pose is everywhere the same: to exploit the riches of 
the earth and to bring men in subjection to it. War- 
ring groups within the exploiting class have utilized 
race hatreds and national rivalries to attain their 
ends. In the present war we see German capitalism, 
in control of the state and a strong military organiza- 
tion, seeking to extend its sway over the Balkans 
and Asia Minor and coveting the coal and iron mines 
of Belgium and northern France. But it has suffered 
in this war; less, to be sure, than the German people, 
who must bear the chief burden, but still sufficiently 
to demonstrate that war is a costly way of securing 
economic domination. Capital has suffered through- 
out the world and if it is at all wise it must have 
learned the lesson that co-operation is more profitable 
than war. We should, then, anticipate the fruits of 
this lesson in an effort of capitalism, upon the con- 
clusion of the war, to utilize for the furtherance of 



100 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

its own best interests any international machinery 
which may be organized. Where war has failed, 
peaceful compromise and a pooling of interests may 
prove successful. The American railways learned 
this lesson after costly efforts to devour each other. 
The world is only a larger America, with the same 
possibilities of exploitation and profit. Capitalism 
will be stupid not to learn its lesson and profit there- 
from. 

We should, at the outset, anticipate a rapproche- 
ment of the commercial interests of the United States 
and Great Britain and an effort to adjust their rival- 
ries in Mexico, South America, and China. They 
should aim to establish an international shipping 
trust for the control of the sea. German capital will 
probably be excluded at first from participation in 
the spoils. But German capital controls vast tech- 
nical skill, particularly in the chemical industries, 
and must ultimately be propitiated if costly warfare 
is not again to ensue. Japan, likewise, is too power- 
ful and occupies too favoured a place in the Orient 
to be crushed. Safety and profit will demand her in- 
clusion in the international agreement. 

The world will then be open to the exploitation by 
capital to an extent far greater than has hitherto been 
possible. One can imagine agreement as to methods 
of combating labour, of checking freedom of speech, 
of controlling the press, of allaying popular discontent 



'^i TciTIZEN'AmmE'sTATE 10 1 

by tactful concessions. One can conceive of world- 
wide programs of social betterment whose end shall 
be to create a contented and efficient industrial class 
similar to that of Germany. To steal the program 
of the socialists, to anticipate popular pressure by 
yielding somewhat but without relinquishing control 
should be the "enlightened policy" of the world 
financiers of the future. 

Are these developments fanciful only, or do they 
pre-suppose a Machiavellian cleverness such as capi- 
talism has never yet displayed? It is easy m ret- 
rospect to attribute to foresight and intelligence 
what is more truly the result of the hard knocks of ex- 
perience and the necessity of compromise between 
forces of nearly equal strength. It is a mistake we 
are prone to commit when we survey the develop- 
ment of capitalistic industry and recognize the hold 
which it has upon us. In reality the capitalistic class 
is composed of men whose foresight is no greater 
than that of other men save as it has to do with 
profits. They are deficient in theory and blind to the 
larger social implications of their particular enter- 
prise. But in business, which is a form of warfare, 
they have learned to respect strength, have found that 
it is better to effect a truce than to achieve an exhaust- 
ing victory, and have a quick eye to utilize any chance 
aids which come their way. Their achievements are 
less swiftly realized than were they the result ot 



102 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

plan and intelligent prevision, but the ultimate result 
is much the same. Nor should we suppose them less 
intelligent than ourselves who speculate upon their 
motives and intentions. If war and rivalry mean 
waste, and waste means loss of profits, they should 
learn the lesson as well as we. And should tliey seize 
the machinery for national and international regula- 
tion of industry and seek to turn it to their profit, they 
will do only what we seek to do, albeit with a dif- 
ferent purpose. 

That any world alliance of the forces of capital 
could prevent social revolt, even though granting con- 
cessions to the workers, is doubtful. The intelligence 
of the world is not so easily controlled as its mines 
and rubber forests. But effective revolt can be long 
postponed if capital succeeds in intrenching itself 
behind international agreements and conducts its in- 
dustries without too bitter economic oppression. Our 
concern is to prevent such immediate gain in power 
whatever our confidence in the triumph of democracy 
over autocracy. We should like to share in that 
triumph and not leave all its fruits to the enjoyment 
of posterity. 

What measures, then, may we adopt to check this 
last metamorphosis of autocracy in its Protean forms? 
To have escaped from the terrors of German militar- 
ism into the clutches of world-wide capitalism will 
profit us little. True democracy, economic no less 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 103 



than political, would be weakened thereby. The con- 
trolling power of the world would not be so apparent 
as before nor its abuses so gross, but it would be all 
the more formidable. We have in order to prevent 
such a consummation, to increase the democratic con- 
trol of industry in England and the United States. 
In the United States diis means federal ownership of, 
or direct participation of the government in the ad- 
ministration of, the railways, telegraph and telephone 
systems, the maintenance of the food dictatorship 
established under war conditions, and the taking over 
by the state for national development of mines, for- 
ests, and water power. The war is demonstrating 
that such an enlargement of governmental powers 
is feasible and the machinery to this end is nmch 
of it already in existence. The broad principles un- 
derlying the action can be simply put: those economic 
resources and industries vital to the national welfare 
should be under the nation's direct control in order 
to insure their just and equitable management. It 
has been suggested, also, that labour representatives 
should sit as members in the directorates of all cor- 
porations, an eminently reasonable procedure. And, 
further, there should be a minimum wage law which 
would insure a higher standard of living than now 

maintains. 

Such government participation in industry is vital 
if we are ever to adjust production to consumption. 



104 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

Our present competitive system is notoriously inefR- 
cient in this respect. Periods of over production 
alternate with periods of depression, periods of high 
wages and high prices with those of unemployment 
and low prices. It is a fearsomely hazardous sys- 
tem, productive of misery and dread. Nor are its 
evil effects purely national. Indirectly they are a 
contributing cause to international friction and wars. 
Over production necessitates the "dumping" of goods 
abroad at cost prices or even lower in order that prices 
at home may be maintained. This is a distinct in- 
jury to foreign producers and a legitimate cause of 
grievance. Ultimately the domestic production of 
the nations will need to be determined in part by 
national needs and in part by international agree- 
ment whereby it shall be determined how much goods 
shall be produced for interchange with other coun- 
tries. Such an agreement will be necessary to equal- 
ize production, consumption, and prices throughout 
the world. 

These proposed modifications of our industrial sys- 
tem though socialistic in trend are not state socialism. 
There would still remain a wide margin for individ- 
ual initiative and enterprise. Whether initiative 
needs the spur of large prospective rewards experi- 
ence alone can show. I do not believe it necessary, 
myself. I believe men work largely for the pleasure 
of achievement, self realization, the sense of power. 



I am confident that some form of socialistic co_ope-- 
tion is the goal of our industr.al soaety^ But be 
this as it may, socialism cannot be ach.eved n a day 
and in realizing such a program as I ^-e sket hed 
there is sufficient to absorb our energies for some tm^e 
t come. Are any of the suggested steps -P-j 
cable? I think not. Difficult they may be bu all 
have been taken either here or abroad under the stress 
of war. What can be done in war can be better 
and more wisely done in peace. 

Political changes must, however, prelude and ac- 
company so great an economic revolution. The ma- 
SineryL the popular control of government is now 
quite inadequate to its professed purpose. It is now 
?reely admitted that the founders of our government 
wire more democratic in theory than in ff' -d ou 
subsequent political history has been largely the effort 
of the people to thwart the professional politician 
and the special interests in their attempt to control 
our political institutions. TTie successes have been 
sporadic and superficial rather than continuous and 
profound. The political boss is less crude than for- 
merly but he still exists; and special interests are 
still potent to choose our representatives and to gain 
the ear of Congress, state legislature, and city coun- 
cil Our political history is the record of periodic 
and petty revolution punctuated by stretches of popu- 
lar apathy. 



106 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

Yet popular revolt has achieved its victories. Sen- 
ators are now elected by popular vote, many of our 
small cities have established efficient forms of govern- 
ment, and in a considerable number of states women 
are now entitled to vote and to hold office. The pro- 
fessional politician continues to throw monkey 
wrenches into the wheels of political progress but the 
car does move, though haltingly. Movements for 
the short ballot, the appointment rather than the elec- 
tion of judges, the referendum and recall, and the 
separation of state and municipal elections from 
national elections are gaining in strength. More im- 
portant than these, perhaps, is the demand for propor- 
tional representation in legislative bodies whereby 
small groups may find a political voice. Various de- 
vices have been invented to this end and the adoption 
of some one of them seems imperative. Minority 
parties have only an indirect and slight influence 
upon legislation in our system as at present consti- 
tuted. It is highly desirable that they be granted 
representation in proportion to the number of their 
adherents, and some form of preferential or group 
voting is necessary to this end. 

Our present system expresses the tyranny of majori- 
ties or more often the tyranny of the strongest minor- 
ity group. A member of Congress seldom represents 
a homogeneous constituency. He is a plurality choice 
of electors with various and opposed interests. All 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 107 

of these he cannot represent and he chooses, therefore, 
to represent the strongest of the minority groups, not 
necessarily of the greatest numerical strength but 
greatest in power and influence. This is usually the 
propertied group which, consequently, is represented 
in our legislative bodies far more numerously than on 
the basis of numbers solely it is entitled to be. La- 
bour interests suff"er in inverse ratio, and we have the 
curious result that in Congress the labour interests are 
far less represented than in England or most of the 
continental countries. Labour legislation in this 
country is consequently primitive and unenlightened. 
If the impending governmental control of industry is 
to become democratic in its nature, extensive changes 
in our electoral machinery and methods seem, then, a 
prime requisite. 

Strictly proportional representation would, of 
course, go far to transfer the class control of indus- 
try that now exists to the hands of the mass, for as 
I have been endeavouring to show it will be less possi- 
ble in the future even than now to divorce political 
and economic issues. They are one and the same, 
and in a country whose institutions were genuinely 
democratic all economic legislation would necessarily 
aim at the welfare of the workers who constitute the 
majority of the citizens even though such legislation 
was at the expense of the propertied classes, which, 
in the main, it would inevitably be. Therefore all 



108 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

liberal innovations in our political machinery have 
been fought by capitalism and will continue so to be 
fought while our present system of industrial warfare 
and class rivalry persists. But it is for this same rea- 
son that men of liberal leanings, who believe in the 
mission of democracy, must unite to secure it the 
means to demonstrate its fitness to control our society 
both in political and economic institutions. Political 
democracy leads ultimately to economic equality, 
though the road may be long. Autocracy in wealth 
is its inevitable foe. Their ends can never be the 
same. 

In the world of real things rather than political and 
economic theory, among people of mixed impulses 
and confused thinking, the essential antagonism of 
democracy in politics and industry, on the one hand, 
with privilege, wealth, and autocracy on the other 
is seldom clearly perceived. A man benefiting from 
monopoly and privilege may give his wealth freely 
in a war of democratic peoples with a military autoc- 
racy. He may even spend his time and money to 
secure the election of honest and competent legisla- 
tors or to effect an improvement in political ma- 
chinery. He does not perceive that his power to 
profit from his fellow citizens is due to their political 
inability to curb that power. Nor if the issue were 
clear would all those who enjoy privilege cling to it 
and do all in their power to thwart democracy. The 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 109 

leaders in the fight for freedom have often been men 
of means and position desirous of destroying the very 
conditions which make possible their preferred posi- 
tion. Our economic system, with the premium which 
it places upon selfishness and its extremes of poverty 
and wealth, happily neither destroys all akruism in 
the rich nor all kindliness and charity in the poor. 
And we can anticipate, in a better social order in 
which self-preservation is no longer only another name 
for selfishness, that the better qualities of human 
nature will have freer opportunity to flourish. 

If the questionable success of democracy in Amer- 
ica be alleged as a ground for disbelief in democracy 
as a theory of government, the cause is insufficient. 
If our institutions have failed to realize their preten- 
sions to popular representation and control, the rea- 
son for this condition is not inherent in the democratic 
principle but in the conditions of American life. We 
have hitherto considered our industrial and our polit- 
ical life as separate and distinct. We have failed 
to perceive their vital interdependence. We have 
elected representatives not to guide our social and 
industrial progress but to carry on the minimum of 
government necessary to national defence and the 
operation of our courts of justice. We have acted on 
the belief that a man's chief duty was to make a 
living and that this was best achieved by free indus- 
trial competition. We have conceived it to be the 



110 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

government's business, so far as possible, to keep 
hands off. 

With such a conception of the subordinate place of 
government in our lives, it is no wonder that our rep- 
resentatives have too often been men incompetent to 
deal with social and economic problems, men who 
have made a business of office holding and whom the 
electors responsible for their election have regarded 
more with amusement than with serious interest and 
concern. Let it once be recognized that the function 
of the state is not narrowly political but primarily- 
economic, and the American citizen will make poli- 
tics, as he has hitherto made business, the chief con- 
cern of life. Those who profit by things as they are 
have for a long time past made the politics of ob- 
struction their serious business. Those who are to 
profit by things as they should be will have to make 
the politics of economic reorganization their main in- 
terest. 

That Americans already perceive the serious nature 
of politics and its relation to our material well being 
is evident, I think, from our recent history and is 
apparent in our tentative efforts to meet the serious- 
ness of the labour situation by political action. Until 
recently our labour classes have been on the whole, 
better off than similar classes in England notwith- 
standing the more intelligent industrial legislation in 
England than in the United States. The standard of 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 111 



living here has been relatively high, the opportunity 
for advancement, greater. But this condition has 
been due to the happy accidents of economic position, 
particularly to the vast areas of cheap and fertile 
lands which have served to keep wages high. Cer- 
tainly whatever privileges and advantages labour has 
enjoyed have not been the product of legislative fore- 
sight and wisdom, and now that the conditions which 
produced them have largely disappeared, the free 
lands put under cultivation and the labour market 
flooded with immigrant workers, American labour 
is losing its preferred position. That this is so is 
evident in the growing intensity of the struggle be- 
tween capital and labour, the effort of manufacturers' 
associations to break the power of the unions and that 
of organized labour to hold its place. And despite 
the successes of some of the stronger unions, suc- 
cesses due in large part to abnormal war-time condi- 
tions, the position of organized labour looks to an out- 
sider very precarious. Large industry feels now as 
never before the solidarity of its interests. Indus- 
trial leaders believe as formerly in their "right to run 
their own business," and unless the government steps 
in to regulate industrial conditions they bid fair to 
attain their purpose more effectually than ever be- 
fore. 

Ways of warfare are also being improved, tor 
though the old brutal methods of rifle and strike 



112 TEE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

breaker are still resorted to, employers are learning 
that other methods are less wasteful, arouse less 
popular protest, and are, in the end, more efficacious. 
They have discovered, some of them, that contented 
workers, moderately well paid, comfortably housed, 
and promised pensions for a lifetime of faithful serv- 
ice do more and better work than employes who are 
discontented, made to work too long hours, and forced 
to live under conditions which reduce their physical 
strength and endurance. Profit sharing and bonus 
systems have also been introduced in some indus- 
tries. And insofar as these enlightened methods have 
raised the standard of living they are good. Insofar, 
however, as they have weakened labour organizations 
and reduced labour's power of collective bargaining 
they are inimical to a democratic society. Democ- 
racy demands that the workers be a power in deter- 
mining the conditions of industry and sharing in its 
profits. A working population kept innocuous 
through tactful concessions in hours and wages but 
weakened thereby in its power to organize and intim- 
idated by fear of losing a job or the prospect of a 
pension, is one that men of liberal principles cannot 
contemplate without grave concern. 

The most dangerous situation for American labour 
is improved working conditions bought at the price of 
a weakened organization and consequent diminished 
industrial and political power. And it is perhaps a 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 113 



fortunate thing for the welfare of the country that 
enlightened methods of industrial warfare do not pre- 
vail so widely that the people as a whole are wooed 
to a sense of security and made forgetful of tlie un- 
solved problems of democratic economy. Flagrant 
examples of the industrial tyranny exercised by capi- 
tal are signalized by the recent strikes in the Michigan 
mining district and in Bayonne, New Jersey. Of the 
first, and the impossible conditions and injustice 
which led ignorant unskilled foreign labour of several 
races to effect a crude organization and revolt, no 
word that I have read was printed in our newspapers. 
Of the Bayonne strike, reports deliberately falsified 
were printed in the New York papers. But such 
methods are short-sighted. The truth creeps out 
somehow and makes the average citizen profoundly 
cynical of corporation methods and sceptical of the 
news that he reads in the commercialized press.^ 

Yet more mediaeval in method and perhaps more 
influential in stirring public opinion have been the 
occasional attempts to discredit trade-unionism by 
convicting labour leaders of homicides or attempted 
homicides engineered by capitalistic groups. These 
bespeak a barbarism as great as that existing in Rus- 

iThe report of the President's Mediation Commission with its 
astonishing revelation of the high-handed stupidity of mine owners 
in Arizona and of the lumbermen in the Northwest, affords excellent 
and more recent instances of mdustrial anarchy deliberately mis- 
represented in our press. 



114 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

sia previous to tlie revolution. Indeed the striking 
garment workers in Chicago, young Russian girls 
many of them, unjustly arrested and charged by 
mounted police while peacefully picketing during a 
recent strike, denounced the police as Cossacks. It is 
a novel idea to Americans that refugees from foreign 
tyranny should find in America the same brutal 
methods of oppression that prevailed in their own 
country. 

Yet these exaggerated instances of capitalistic bru- 
tality and blindness serve the excellent purpose of re- 
minding us that the problem of capital in its relation 
to labour is unsolved and that civil war exists within 
the state. It is inconceivable that such conditions can 
be much longer tolerated. The lessons in federal 
control which we are learning in the present war 
should teach us to suppress such anarchy, and, more, 
so to alter industrial conditions that they shall hence- 
forth be determined by guiding principles of justice 
formulated by the people. Before the United States 
entered the war it seemed probable that the conclusion 
of the peace would find us the least advanced, the 
least liberal of the civilized peoples. All western 
Europe and Russia were learning at a terrible price 
the lesson that democracy must be efficient to combat 
autocracy successfully. Essential to that efficiency 
have been state control of wages, hours, and working 
conditions of the workers, and of the relations of em- 



THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE 115 

ployer and employed. Wealth and industrial or- 
ganizations have been conscripted no less than fight- 
ing men. We too, perhaps, must pay the price to 
learn our lesson. But here and abroad the lesson will 
mean little if not learned once and for all and the 
measures of control devised in war times continued 
after the peace. But with this profound difference: 
that the administrative machinery be no longer in the 
hands of a dictator but be subject to the popular will. 
If the nations fail to perpetuate their administrative 
machinery and to devise means for its popular control 
things will again assume dominance over men, and 
autocracy, in one form or another, persist. 

This is the time to do much. The reformer and 
idealist who formerly demanded these changes and 
was cried down as an impractical dreamer has been 
justified by the fact. He can point to what has been 
done as proof that a better political and industrial 
organization is feasible. If we have but the sense 
to realize it a newer society with Utopian possibilities 
is in our hands to do with what we will. Uncon- 
trolled by democratic ideals the organization we have 
achieved will either dissolve into its old warring ele- 
ments or, more probably, be diverted to autocratic 
uses. We owe it to those who survive this war, and 
even more to those who have died, to perpetuate in 
the terms of peace and in our national betterment 
thereafter the lessons in justice and democracy which 



116 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

the war has taught. We must demonstrate that a 
federation of genuinely free peoples can be the out- 
growth of a war of tyranny and terribleness upon the 
idealism of man. 



IV 

THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 

The new internationalism, relying as it must, at the 
outset, in part upon an international police and the 
threat of force to maintain order and prevent aggres- 
sion, can hope for success only as that force is exer- 
cised justly and as the smaller nations share increas- 
ingly in its control. England, France, and the United 
States must needs anticipate the democratization of 
the international ruling body by the voluntary curtail- 
ment of their power and influence. Such a surrender 
of power for the good of the greatest number, essen- 
tial as it is to a truly democratic federation of the 
world, will demand a greater unselfishness among the 
nations, a more complete surrender of that false pride 
of race and the narrow patriotism which we now know 
than history has yet witnessed. Only through this 
voluntary relinquishment of power, however, can the 
fatal belief in imperial destiny and the divine right 
to rule be quenched. It is conceivable that these 
national obsessions may die out, in a saner world, with 
a freer interchange of thought and a closer political 

117 



118 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

organization than at present exists; but if this is to be 
so, national self -consciousness, racial vanity, and the 
restricted patriotism of our day must no longer be 
kept alive by commercial profits fostered by political 
prestige. As surely as a league to enforce peace be- 
comes a league of commercially powerful nations ex- 
ploiting the rest of the world to its profit, so certainly 
will democratic world organization be checked at its 
inception. The desire for profits when added to 
racial enmities and national jealousies is too great 
a force for idealism to overcome. Therefore eco- 
nomic democracy must accompany political democ- 
racy. 

Such a relinquishment of the desire for world 
power in trade demands in the individual nations, 
as we have seen, an economic reorganization aiming 
at the democratic control of all the forces of the state, 
the checking of capitalism, and the relinquishment by 
the powerful few of their present ideals of exploita- 
tion. It demands that standards of living be raised, 
that poverty and disease be eradicated, and that hu- 
man equality as we have defined it be secured in far 
greater degree than we now know. Apparently, then, 
this change in national ideals and the consequent de- 
struction of international rivalries demands an en- 
largement of our social morality as manifested in our 
economic society today. 

But the higher social morality which is displacing 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 119 



the older individual codes already exists in more than 
rudimentary form. It has been developing through- 
out the last hundred years. In the last twenty it has 
grown with marvellous rapidity, preparing the way 
for vast social changes of which we have as yet only 
scattered hints in actual institutions. It seems prob- 
able that the war will do much to disseminate the 
ideals of this morality yet farther. The war touches 
in every capacity the lives of the nations engaged, 
influencing peasant and artisan no less than king and 
warlord. The millions of men under arms will re- 
turn to their homes with a new discontent with the 
old order and its injustices, inequalities, and brutali- 
ties. From this society of ours has sprung war and 
all its horror and agony. It is inconceivable that 
men should henceforth be content with their old ways. 
The discontent engendered by the war is manifest. 
Revolt in Russia, revolution in China and the East, 
the demands of labour in all industrial states are but 
surface indications of a world-wide unrest. Even 
more significant is the religious tone of the literature 
of the day. Men are examining their beliefs. Con- 
ventional acceptances, a superficial orthodoxy, do not 
suffice the human soul in hours of agony and loss. 
The war has brought us face to face with poignant 
realities and we need a new religion and a new 
morality if we are to endure the vision of them. The 
old religion of other-worldliness with its justifica- 



120 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

tion of things as they are, mequalities and suffering 
being imposed by an infallible God for disciplinary 
purposes, is a poor solace to men and women suffer- 
ing the agonies of this war. A God who should de- 
cree such pain is not one in whom they can believe. 
No heavenly recompense, no ethical gain from suf- 
fering can justify the pain of life to them. 

They ask of religion that it aid them to refashion 
the world into a place tolerable to human existence. 
They ask a God who needs their aid, not one who de- 
mands their submission. Life proves so inconceiv- 
ably horrible in time of war, so far beneath the aspi- 
rations of all men, that they turn savagely upon the 
whole order of their existence resolved to sweep away 
the pack of lies and half truths taught by religion, 
education, and social tradition. Nor are there lack- 
ing ideals for a new social order, a loftier morality, 
and nobler conceptions of God than of one who, for 
an inscrutable purpose, dooms the greater part of 
mankind to misery in times of peace and to agony in 
times of war. 

The root ideal of the new order of human life we 
know as democracy, if we think of it in political 
terms; as universal brotherhood, if our point of view 
is economic; and as pantheism if our interest is 
theological. Politically the ideal demands that every 
man and woman have an equal voice in the manage- 
ment of human society for the welfare of all. Those 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 121 



who administer the government do so as representa- 
tives of the mass and are elected by it. This ideal 
is so widespread and its further dissemination is so 
certain that no more need be said of it. But the ne- 
cessity, for its realization, that our social and eco- 
nomic aims be altogether altered, and back of this 
our individual morality and conception of God is 
not so clear. We do not always see that a political 
democracy is possible only in a society which knows 
no great disparities in wealth and in which the am- 
bitions and desires of the individual are not primarily 
economic. Nor do we always realize that God can 
no longer be conceived of as a remote and distant 
force enslaving men for his obscure purposes, but the 
larger all-embracing consciousness of the world real- 
izing his aims through the willing co-operation of men. 
The chain must be complete if men are to be bound to 
worthy action, international and national ideals find- 
ing their strength in individual morality, which de- 
rives its inspiration from an immanent God. 

The ambitions of most men in our day are to 
acquire property in order that they may have free- 
dom of movement, bodily ease, opportunity to marry 
whom they choose, and leisure for the gratification of 
tastes and aptitudes. The end they seek is some 
vague freedom, some hazy happiness. But so great 
is the struggle for the attainment of the means that 
the end is seldom realized. Even those who secure 



122 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

independence find that the effort has exhausted their 
energy or diverted their very interest to money get- 
ting. In the effort to acquire they fail to learn how 
to spend. They are unfitted to enjoy art and litera- 
ture or to learn from travel and social intercourse. 
The cultivation of the arts becomes the collecting 
of pictures, first editions, and fine bindings. Social 
life becomes competitive ostentation — "conspicuous 
waste." The man who has both the means and the 
taste to make his life an instance of what life at its 
best may be is very rare. 

That many men now, and ultimately all men, should 
live finely, economic security must be made univer- 
sal. There is inevitable work in the world, for we 
must be fed and clothed, and this work must be 
shared. But toil is not good in itself. Possibly 
there is moral and spiritual value to be got from 
digging in the earth and watching things grow from 
one's labour. But when one must work ten and 
twelve hours a day in good weather and bad there 
is left no margin for spiritual experience and men- 
tal enjoyment. Toil is a necessity only, and the 
aim of society is to make it bear lightly upon all. 
Creative work, done for the joy of making, the work 
of the artist and craftsman, is another thing. It is 
recreation not toil. If the accumulated wealth of the 
world were divided more equitably and if the vast 
waste and reduplication of effort in our chaotic eco- 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 123 

nomic system were eliminated, the hours of toil re- 
quired of us all could be vastly reduced, how much 
only the experiment itself can reveal. Then the prac- 
tice of the arts and crafts, and the refinement of social 
intercourse would be our chief concern and interest. 
In these we should find the means to a finer and more 
joyous way of life. 

The development of machine industry in the last 
century came too soon and too rapidly for its best 
social utilization. Here as in other instances — 
notably the scientific warfare of our day — human in- 
ventions outstripped institutional and moral develop- 
ment. The tremendous increase in the world's 
wealth made possible by the use of machinery was 
under no social control. Society at the end of the 
eighteenth century was, economically, much as it had 
been since the beginning of time, a struggle for sur- 
vival little regulated or ameliorated by the state. The 
moral code justified a man in securing all the wealth 
he could get and expending it as he chose. He ex- 
acted the highest prices for his product that he could 
secure; he paid his workman no more than he must. 
The economic theories of the laissez faire system were 
developed to explain the facts as they existed. Work- 
ers in free competition for jobs, producers competing 
freely — freedom was the political catchword of the 
day, and therefore the economist labelled the com- 
petitive system then existing as free. 



124 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

How empty is such freedom we have learned to our 
cost in the last one hundred years. The state has in- 
creasingly been forced to interfere, restricting capital 
in its uses and ameliorating the condition of labour — 
to no great extent in either case, but somewhat. And 
meanwhile our social morality has slowly altered, a 
fact made evident by the distaste we feel for the in- 
dustrial warfare of our time. That warfare is fre- 
quently as barbarous as in 1840 in the factory towns 
of the north of England; so too is the warfare in the 
trenches in Flanders as barbarous as that of the 
Napoleonic era. But the moral protest of the world 
in both instances is vastly stronger and more universal 
than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago. The 
conviction is growing that both war and industrial 
strife can and must be prevented. Dimly we perceive 
that our ideals of nationality and international rivalry 
have all been wrong. Dimly we realize that the in- 
dustrial warfare of our day is likewise a survival 
from barbaric times. 

The newer social morality demands that our indus- 
trial arena be something other than a gladiatorial cir- 
cus wherein Christian folk are slaughtered by the 
mercenaries. It would do away with economic 
rivalry and "survival of the fittest," and place land 
and those products of the earth essential to human 
subsistence within the control of the state for the good 
of all. Excessive and irksome toil it looks upon as 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 125 
an evil remediable by a little human foresight, in- 
genuity, and goodwill. It is feasible that every 
human being should have ample of the necessaries ot 
life in return for a few hours of work daily under 
wholesome conditions. That the problem of indus- 
trial re-organization is a complicated and difficult 
one does not make its solution the less imperative. 
Nor is it a task too great for human intelligence pro- 
vided we attack it with sufficient fervour. Problems 
almost as difficult are being solved today under the 
stress of war. The greatest obstacle to it is that the 
most powerful among us lack as yet an idealism suffi- 
ciently compelling to enforce what they falsely con- 
ceive to be a great personal sacrifice. 

For an economic democracy presupposes the con- 
fiscation of vested wealth to state control, or the volun- 
tary surrender of wealth from motives of patriotism 
and goodwill. It is conceivable that patriotism may 
come to mean this, the free offering in times of peace, 
no less than in times of war, of property and human 
services to the needs of the state. It is only the 
logical enlargement of an altruistic motive of grea 
power in human life. In times of war and national 
peril whole nations, like communities devastated by 
fire or earthquake, sink their differences of class and 
caste and offer their lives and property to the common 
weal. Much of the selfishness which is the natural 
product of our economic system in times of peace is 



126 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

forgotten. And from this surrender of self and per- 
sonal ambitions there is born a feeling of community 
interest, of brotherhood, which in the eyes of some 
goes far to justify war. Those who remain at home 
feel something of the soldier's pride in his corps, 
something of his sense of comradeship with his fel- 
low soldiers. But when the moment of peril is over, 
the passion for brotherly helpfulness slowly fades, 
men relapse into their old rivalries and jealousies, 
and patriotism becomes again a conventional and 
meaningless sentiment. 

The ability to forget rivalries and jealousies and 
work for a common cause, and the feeling of brother- 
hood which comes from such devotion, are forces 
which we should seek to utilize not rarely in times of 
war but constantly in times of peace. If, at the height 
of their patriotic ardour, men could be made to see 
that human brotherhood is the most desirable and 
possible of conditions they would be moved to offer 
themselves to the constructive work of peace as for the 
destructive work of war. But only as some such 
moment of high feeling is seized by the leaders of the 
nations will society make that sudden leap from its 
present state of semi-barbarism to a civilization com- 
mensurate with its best ideals. Such a moment will 
be the coming peace when, with the sacrifices of the 
war still vividly before them, men will pause an 
instant before resuming the pursuits of normal life 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 127 

and ask themselves why such horrors need ever be 
repeated. That will be the time to turn men's 
thoughts to the problem of altering the world into 
something more generous, finer, more truly expres- 
sive of their better selves. 

War, with all its recrudescence of primitive pas- 
sions and savagery is not truly expressive of men. 
They look with horror upon the thing they have made 
and cannot undo. Nor is our civilization in times of 
peace truly expressive of men. It is less generous 
than they, more heartless and unfeeling. Like war, 
our industrial society with its cruelties and oppres- 
sions is a vast and terrible mechanism, so strong and 
complicated that individual men feel helpless to re- 
make it upon saner and juster lines. Only when, as 
in war, men are moved by overwhelming emotion are 
they able to free themselves from the heritage of the 
past and work freely to the accomplishment of a com- 
mon end. For the transformation demanded in peace 
a wave of religious emotion would be the most fit- 
ting medium. But to this we can hardly look hope- 
fully in the present stage of the world, not at least 
to such religious emotion as we have known in the 
past. But that the leaders of the world should, at the 
peace, call upon the latent altruism and goodwill of 
men that exists in all, irrespective of religious affilia- 
tions, would accomplish much. An appeal to the 
rich and the powerful to forego selfish ambitions and 



128 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

aid the state to social betterment would go far to 
guide civilization into new paths, would perhaps re- 
mould our society, for the rich no less than the poor 
are unable to find genuine happiness in the world 
which we know. 

Those sensitive to modern ideals, growingly con- 
scious of the needs of their fellows, as all men of 
fine feeling must be today, know that only as the 
society about them is freed from injustice and suffer- 
ing can they as individuals, no matter what their 
wealth and freedom, find happiness. The modem 
world differs profoundly in this respect from the 
Athenian state to which we look for much of our in- 
spiration in literature and art. Athens was based 
upon slavery, and the leisurely debates of philoso- 
phers and finely fashioned statues and temples were 
made possible only by the economic servitude of the 
masses. That this was so did not then disturb the 
thinker and artist. The men of gold were divinely 
constituted to rule the men of baser metals. And 
all highly cultivated societies from the age of Pericles 
until our own have been moved little if at all by the 
miserable and restricted lives of those beneath them. 
It is no longer so. The temper of the time, the widen- 
ing of the social consciousness will not permit artist 
or thinker to dwell apart oblivious of those who fur- 
nish him with food and leisure. Too many poems 
like The Song of the Shirt and The Cry of the Chil- 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 129 

dren have been written to enable him to forget the 
sweatshop and the cottonmill. The literature, art, 
and philosophy of his time are saturated with allu- 
sions to social problems. If he lives a life of self- 
gratification, however lofty, he is forever haunted by 
the shadow of those without his cloistered peace, 
those who lack what is his. And so he can never 
find happiness or serenity in a world such as ours. 
Nor will sensitive men ever find happiness and seren- 
ity until our world is altered. Christianity, or what- 
ever the moving force may be, has made us aware 
of our kinship with all men, and our landless cousins 
who sit at our gates can never be banished from our 
thoughts, try as we may to exorcise them. 

That this is so is evident even in slight contacts 
with stupid wealthy people ; much more with those of 
finer grain. One hears the casual well-to-do tourist 
and pleasure seeker or the snobbish social climber 
forever protesting against reformers, trade unions, 
labour leaders, socialists, radical writers and leaders 
— he calls them demagogues and agitators. He will 
introduce the topic when you least desire it and bore 
you with his primitive views. And he does it, I think, 
not because he is haunted by a fear of dispossession 
or anticipates that he will be held accountable as an 
unfit steward of his goods, but because of some 
obscure prick of conscience which irritates and tor- 
ments him he knows not clearly why. He does not 



130 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

know how to do other than he does, but the impulse to 
make some surrender is there. He is in the state of 
mind of the blackguard and wife-beater whom Shaw 
depicts in Major Barbara, loathing his way of life 
and hating those who would convert him. Only a 
very thick-skinned person can be insensitive to this 
spirit of our time, while those of fine feeling must al- 
ways be unhappy even in the pursuit of the finest 
things in life so long as the freedom they enjoy is not 
a freedom shared equally by all. 

Perhaps it is because of this conviction of sin that 
the wealthy classes of our day produce nothing of 
worth in art, or thought, or literature. Yet less have 
they achieved that noble manner of life, in itself the 
finest of arts, which redeemed somewhat the aristoc- 
racies of other ages. No aristocracy will ever again 
attain noble living, for noble spirits no longer be- 
lieve in aristocracy. They devote their lives to the 
effort which has seemed so long hopeless of bringing 
light to the dark places and giving to all men those 
opportunities of life which in a happier world they 
would themselves seek to enjoy. This is an added 
reason, perhaps the greatest, why at this crisis in the 
world's history, the best thought and feeling of the 
age may if rightly guided, be turned to the destruc- 
tion of our social evils. Men are not lacking now 
who realize that only as all men find freedom and 
opportunity for happiness is true freedom and hap- 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 131 

piness possible to any one. The social consciousness 
of our age will not permit us to feel otherwise. 

§2 

The sensitiveness of the modem soul to the woes of 
white men and black whether in the slums of London 
and New York or in the rubber forests of the Congo 
is an acknowledgment of human kinship the world 
over. It does not necessarily imply the recognition 
of the political and economic equality of all men — 
for this is an intellectual rather than an emotional 
conception. But it is a recognition of their spiritual 
equality, their equal, because infinite, value to the 
World Spirit. It is a curious thing, this recognition 
of spiritual kinship. Those who feel it most keenly 
are often not religious people, are indeed unbelievers 
in the conventional sense that they are members of 
no church and have no interest in dogma. Yet were 
this emotion to be rationalized and explained in theo- 
logical or metaphysical terms we should premise as a 
unifying whole in which all men have a part a World 
Spirit for whom we have no intelligible name but 
God. 

A God who sums up in himself all the lesser 
souls of men, whom we know best as we respond with 
sympathy to the sorrows and joys of humanity, is a 
God different from the God of history and theological 
dispute. He is closer to us, for we feel him in our 



132 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

hearts; we do not fear him in the anathemas of 
priests. He is not the lawgiver and judge, formid- 
able and remote, of Hebrew tradition. He is some- 
thing more intimate even than a spiritual father com- 
passionating and suffering for the sins and errors of 
his children. He has a part in us and we are a part 
of him. We must feel that our hopes are his also, 
our failures his. We must feel that our desire for a 
better world, a kingdom of heaven upon earth, is his 
dream also. And we must feel with a profound con- 
viction the necessity of aiding God to attain his vision, 
believing that he works only through us and is de- 
pendent upon our co-operation with his purposes. 

God, so conceived, is no vague first cause, no mere 
name for necessity. He is not omnipotent. He is 
the sum of life, and the modem man conceives of the 
life force as a persistent, patient, but finite and re- 
stricted power seeking to express itself in finer and 
more varied forms of life that overcome the restric- 
tions of matter and necessity in an ever urgent aspi- 
ration for greater freedom; which learns by experi- 
ence, and despite setbacks struggles upward towards 
some goal never wholly achieved because always re- 
formulated in finer terms as lesser goals are attained 
and passed. 

Such a God is not omnipotent but must war upon 
recalcitrant matter and bend it to his purposes. He 
is not free but attains ever greater freedom through 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 133 

effort and travail. We must think of him as a per- 
sonality like ourselves, suffering with us and learning 
from our experience but with a finer and more ample 
vision than we individually possess. We can feel our- 
selves grow closer to him in prayer and in compliance 
with our sense of duty. We can renew our strength 
as we feel confidence in his enduring purpose. We 
can feel a sense of fellowship with him as we learn to 
love our fellowmen, and a growth in freedom as we 
struggle to attain it. Our hell is our failure to at- 
tempt the realization of our best possibilities; our 
heaven only a sense of growth and progress and 
closer affiliation with God in his attainment of his 
ends. 

A God who is not omnipotent nor inscrutable but 
who realizes his aspirations only imperfectly and 
slowly, like ourselves, is a necessity to the modem 
man, never more so than today when to conceive of 
God as voluntarily decreeing the horrors of the pres- 
ent war would be to alienate him altogether from the 
possibility of human love and trust. A God who 
could so decree would be no other than a devil to us, 
try as theologians might to exonerate him on the plea 
of inscrutable purposes and man's restricted vision. 
It is a God intelligible to man that is our present 
necessity and such a God must be fallible though 
aspiring, of limited powers but persistent and patient, 
working through us but also dependent upon us. 



134 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

To the sceptical modern world Christ is wholly 
intelligible only as a man of great spiritual insight, 
great sympathy with suffering, a seer who held the 
vision of a regenerated world, the Kingdom of Heaven 
upon earth. When Christ is thought of as divine his 
teaching and his suffering mean nothing to us. If 
Christ is thought of as a man they become real and 
show the possibilities of human sympathy and sacri- 
fice. Christ was a reformer consumed with a passion 
to relieve the misery of the world and to set men upon 
the path of righteousness and freedom. He wished 
to found a new social order based upon equality and 
justice. Two thousand years after his execution the 
world is realizing the simple and practical truth of 
his teachings. 

This recognition of a more human Christ 
comes from those outside the churches, the un- 
orthodox — though the spread of this conception has 
of late altered somewhat the conventional teachings 
of orthodoxy. Institutional religion is, however, no- 
toriously hostile to innovation and jealous of its 
authority. Though it has played a notable part in 
political history by reason of its wealth and temporal 
power, it has never espoused the theory that its func- 
tions were primarily earthly and human rather than 
other worldly and spiritual. It has utilized social 
institutions for its own ends but has never consid- 
ered it the function of the church to alter social and 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 135 

political institutions to keep pace with an advancing 
morality. Its moral teaching has, in short, been 
personal rather than social. Seldom has it been an 
instrument of reform. When not ostensibly assuming 
a neutral position it has actively opposed progressive 
movements, both political and economic. 

Thus it is that radicals, idealists, and men of pro- 
gressive spirit are to be found mostly without the 
pale of the church and have come to regard the church 
as an institution surviving from another day, one 
which must be torn down before the world can be 
reorganized upon better and freer lines. This is un- 
fortunate, for the world has need today of spiritual 
guidance and a haven of consolation and strength. 
But what consolation can the church as we know it 
offer to men? It tells them to turn their thoughts 
upon another world. It offers a God omnipotent and 
just who can yet approve, because he ordains, life as 
men know it. Men ask a God as sensitive, as kindly, 
and as just as themselves. Him they find in their 
hearts, if at all, and whatever formal deference they 
may pay to creed and ritual is due to habit rather 
than to any expectation of spiritual profit. 

The Church fails because it lags behind rather than 
leads the moral development of society. Its moral- 
ity is that of a primitive people, not of a complicated 
industrial society. The ten commandments are no 
more an adequate guide to social conduct than would 



136 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

the Code of Hammurabi suffice the Supreme Court of 
the United States in passing judgment upon a con- 
spiracy in restraint of trade. The man of today 
wishes light upon child labour, socialism, birth con- 
trol, woman's suffrage — a host of pressing issues, 
political to be sure but also moral, for they must be 
decided not upon the ground of expediency only but 
upon that of right and justice. "Thou shalt not covet 
anything that is thy neighbour's" can be made to 
mean that a man should be content with an insufficient 
wage and be satisfied in that position in life to which 
God has called him. It is difficult to extract any 
wider implication from it if one's moral aim is social 
rather than narrowly personal. 

Whether consciously or no, organized religion has 
for the most part aligned itself with the powers of 
this world rather than with the spiritual forces of the 
invisible world. It is opposed to radicalism in all 
its forms as expressive of spiritual aspirations foreign 
to the churchly tradition. Of the rich it asks finan- 
cial support and a conventional family morality. 
But upon the more difficult question of the obligation 
of wealth to the state or the yet more difficult justifica- 
tion of wealth in private hands it casts no light. It 
has failed to see that human morality is a growth, that 
it must alter with a changing world. The moral codes 
that were adequate to a primitive people or to the 
feudal age are no longer sufficient. 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 137 

These are obvious truths and are perceived as such 
by many communicants and even by an appreciable 
number of ministers and priests, too few, however, to 
determine the character of the church as an institu- 
tion. Its spiritual power today is warped by its tradi- 
tions, by its dependence upon the financial support of 
the rich, by the respectable character of its congre- 
gations, and most of all perhaps, by its racial and na- 
tional limitations. Greek, Roman, Lutheran, and 
English churches do not unite to teach the brother- 
hood of man and the spiritual kinship of Prussian, 
Slav, Frenchman, and Jew. The clergy of Germany 
pray for the destruction of the enemy and the triumph 
of German arms. And the clergy of America pray 
for the overthrow of Germany. Like the tariff, God 
is a "local issue." 

To idealists little concerned with the Church's ulti- 
mate failure or success, because convinced that finer 
ideals will one day rule the world whether or no the 
church accepts or rejects them, it is nevertheless dis- 
appointing that the church at such a time as now 
shows so little aptitude for leadership. The majority 
of the citizens in the warring nations are members 
of some church. They are conventional "average" 
people, respecting the great tradition of the church 
and looking a bit wistfully to priest and minister for 
spiritual guidance. They wish to see the way to 
peace upon earth and good will toward men* And 



138 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

the church, if it had but the vision to reply to this 
need in honest terms freed of all pietistic phrasing, 
could do inexpressibly much at such a time of moral 
questioning as this to turn men's thoughts to brother- 
hood and love rather than to hate; to a constructive 
hope rather than to hateful memories and despair. 
If the church is ever again to be a moral guide to 
progress, not a check upon it, it can ask no greater 
opportunity than that of today in which to show its 
possibilities for leadership. 

Consider first the international changes which the 
church must anticipate and welcome if it is to be- 
come something more than a parochial institution. 
The Christian world is divided into a considerable 
number of churches, some with communicants all over 
the world, others coterminous with single states, and 
many — offshoots of the larger parent church — of rel- 
atively small size and restricted influence. Yet all 
profess the same source of inspiration: the life of 
Christ as narrated in the New Testament. All be- 
lieve in a God, however variously defined and with 
what not mystical attributes and powers. All pro- 
fess, too, to bring men nearer to God and to enable 
them to lead better lives. With this much in common 
there seems no sane reason for their hostility one to 
another. What sensible modem person is concerned 
with the nature of the baptismal ceremony or in- 
deed whether or no such a ceremony exist. It is 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 139 

ritualistic merely. In itself it has no spiritual value, 
is at most a symbol, significant to some, meaningless 
to others. And so with all the multitudinous differ- 
ences in creed, ritual, dress, and what not. These 
are harmless enough save as they serve like differ- 
ences in speech, dress, manners, and customs among 
nations to divide men and to perpetuate their ancient 
jealousies and antagonisms. The church, which has 
taught the fatherhood of God and, by implication, the 
brotherhood of man must needs keep pace with the 
modem world which desires greater political unity. 
The church should anticipate this union by a closer 
religious organization of the Christian nations, a pre- 
liminary to the religious union of all nations. Chris- 
tian and non-Christian. 

There have been tentative movements towards such 
a union among churches of not too divergent a ritual 
and system of control, but a complete and effective 
union in which all shall lay aside much that is pecul- 
iar and individual for the more effective emphasis 
upon what is truly essential and common to all seems 
now less imminent than the political federation of 
nations. For churches share not only racial and na- 
tional animosities and jealousies but add thereto the 
extreme conservatism of wealth and tradition; and 
each is convinced that only through adherence to its 
particular formulae are salvation and righteousness to 
be achieved. Perhaps some great revival of religious 



140 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

feeling such as animated Christendom at the time of 
the first crusade may sweep away all the old meaning- 
less barriers. But such a revival is unpredictable. 
The war might possibly generate it. But it remains a 
hope, only, not a likelihood. 

Great as are the obstacles to the world union of the 
Christian churches, yet more difficult will be the fed- 
eration of religions the world over and the recogni- 
tion of their equality in the eyes of that God whom 
all alike seek to know. This acknowledgment would 
be but another extension of the democratic principle 
whose realization we seek. It would not mean neces- 
sarily that Christianity was ethically no higher than 
Mohammedanism, nor Confucianism than Buddhism. 
It would mean merely this, that the adherents of all 
religions should be equally free to worship as they 
chose and be subject to no political or other pressure 
to change their way of thinking. The higher religion 
will displace the lower only as it is needed and sought. 
Conversion of savage peoples to Christianity is 
usually meaningless, for only in exceptional instances 
does the savage convert understand the meaning of the 
religion he professes. Much better would be his 
adoption of some religion only a bit in advance of that 
to which he was bom, one not too opposed to the 
habits and customs he has always known. So it is 
recognized in many quarters that Mohammedanism 
is a better means of raising the African savage in the 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 141 

scale of civilization than is Christianity. Likewise 
the practice of the wisest missionaries in training the 
native peoples to the best in their primitive religions 
before seeking to convert them to Christianity, is evi- 
dence of the growing charity and wisdom of the 
world — or of a small corner of it. 

If the world is to know a better relationship among 
the nations, and if all are to be masters of their 
destiny, free to grow as they will so long as they 
do not encroach upon others, the Christian churches 
must renounce all effort to proselytize when their 
presence among alien peoples is not requested. If 
Christianity is truly the superior to all other beliefs, 
let the lives of Christians demonstrate as much. 
Hindoo, Chinaman, and Jap will seek Christianity of 
themselves when the white race has aroused their 
reverence and admiration. Then we shall have no 
need of missionaries, nor the backing of battleships 
and punitive expeditions. Christianity will spread 
by reason of its own inherent worth. Conversion by 
the sword is an aid to economic conquest but not to 
spiritual enlightenment. 

These are radical concessions for the Christian 
churches to make if they are to become leaders in the 
democratization of the world. Greater yet must be 
their regeneration if they are to assume constructive 
leadership in the social morality of our day. Where 
before the church has taught a personal and tradi- 



142 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

tional morality and has been hostile to innovation it 
will need to be revolutionary in its social teachings, 
affirming religion, politics, and economics to be in- 
separable, to be in fact but different ways of regarding 
man in his relations with his fellows. 

In some of the Protestant churches clergymen have 
felt it their duty to preach upon civic affairs, have 
taken a hand in politics and been leaders in move- 
ments for "reform." But for the most part, clergy- 
men and the church vote, the "good people," are easily 
hoodwinked by the professional politician. The 
reason is simple enough: their moral code is too 
primitive to be adequate to the complexity of modern 
conditions. The "respectable" candidate whose 
family life is stainless and who is a declared foe of 
the saloon will win their votes even though he is hand 
in glove with public utility corporations and the "big 
interests." The candidate who declares for a "closed 
town" may wink at franchise grabs and be a friend 
to graft. A morality so simple that it thinks the 
saloon the root of all evil and a conventional sex 
morality the chief virtue in a candidate for office is of 
little practical value to the cause of righteousness in 
our political life. 

This reliance upon a primitive moral code and 
naive faith in the promises of politicians are inexcus- 
able today, for any one who can read can learn the 
patent fact that our politics are corrupt for the reason 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 143 

that our political machinery, subject to the pressure of 
private interests, ceases to do the work for which it 
was designed: to fulfil the wishes of the people. And 
from this failure springs a multitude of evils — in- 
equitable taxation, poor housing inspection, defective 
health measures, poor transit service — inefficiency and 
waste on every hand, the price a community pays for 
surrendering its liberties to a political machine and 
those who profit therefrom. Though all this is obvi- 
ous enough, is written in the history of any political 
campaign in our larger cities, the respectable people 
do not seem to learn. Yet out of this corruption and 
perversion of democracy spring the veritable carnal 
sins which churches seem to regard as their chief 
enemy. A simple illustration will serve. 

In the psychopathic laboratory of the Juvenile De- 
tention Home in Chicago, delinquent girls are ex- 
amined and committed to various reformatory insti- 
tutions. Many of the girls when released are re- 
formed, truly desirous, if peraiitted, of leading re- 
spectable lives. Yet the attendants at the home 
declared recently that their work was largely useless 
for the reason that the girls were enticed into their 
old ways by keepers of brothels. Appeals to the 
police to suppress the brothels were of no avail, for 
the "business administration," the "reform mayor," 
ostensibly the foe to the saloon, permitted a wide- 
open town. This mayor had been supported in his 



144 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

candidacy by hundreds of clergymen because, for- 
sooth, he had declared that it would be his first act 
as mayor to enforce the Sunday closing law. This 
conventional bait had won him thousands of respect- 
able but unintelligent votes. 

The instance demonstrates merely that people to 
whom Sunday observance is a prime political and 
moral issue are easy game for the politician. But it 
is an ominous instance, for ministers and church peo- 
ple must show far better moral judgment than this if 
they are to do their part in achieving a genuine democ- 
racy. The sin which churches seek to overcome is 
most of it not bom of innate depravity, "original 
sin," but of social conditions. It is due to bad 
housing, insufficient food, a corrupt environment, bad 
home training by overworked and underpaid parents, 
deficient education, child labour, too little opportu- 
nity for wholesome recreation — innumerable evils 
which prey on body and soul and lead girls into 
vice and boys into crime. If the churches honestly 
pursue sin — such obvious sin as theft, murder, and 
prostitution — to its source and seek to eradicate it 
there, they will be forced at once into "practical 
politics." If they mean by the phrases "brothers in 
Christ" or "children of God" more than communi- 
cants of a particular faith they will be led, in their 
effort to attain a true brotherhood of man, to trans- 
form our industrial society. They will seek as their 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 145 

object a greater equalization of property than exists 
at present, a high minimum wage, strict housing laws, 
and democratic control of tlie means of production — 
all those immediate and pressing needs which are the 
commonplaces of social reform. Sin, like disease, 
is largely a social product. Churches which war in- 
telligently upon sin must lead in the revolution of a 
society which produces sin. 

Furthermore the church must face honestly a new 
morality of the family and childbearing. The grave- 
yards of New England are filled with the bodies of 
young mothers who died in childbirth, the third and 
fourth wives, often enough, of God-fearing Puritans. 
The church has preached from the text "increase and 
multiply." With Luther it has taught that women 
dying in childbirth were blessed in the fulfilment of 
a godly duty. It has urged the duty of having large 
families. What the lives of women have been under 
such instruction only doctors can tell. Twenty thou- 
sand women die yearly in the United States during 
childbirth, and the invalidism, insanity, and stunted 
lives which are another consequence of untimely 
motherhood are beyond computation. Much of this 
tragedy is unnecessary; yet only a few reformers — 
jailed for the dissemination of "immoral literature" 
— and a few scientists and leading doctors have thus 
far had the courage and public spirit to advocate the 
practise of birth control. 



146 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

Yet everyone knows that birth control is widely 
practised by the better informed classes and that the 
result of this practise is not immorality but smaller 
families, more carefully nurtured, and mothers more 
physically fit and freed from the constant dread of 
inopportune pregnancy. Unless men are to continue 
to breed and perish like the brutes and unless over- 
crowded populations are to seek new lands by war and 
conquest or be periodically reduced by the plague, 
the practise of birth control must be universal in 
crowded and civilized states. Practised by moral 
people birth control is a moral act. But will the 
churches be among the first to spread this morality? 
Will clergymen give the weight of their influence to 
this vital reform? I have yet to hear of one such. 
Doubtless he would be harried from his charge. And 
yet if clergymen are to be moral leaders they must 
be prepared to be martyrs. 

§3 
The object of this brief discussion of the church in 
its relation to politics and an evolving morality has 
been to point out briefly the relation of morals to eco- 
nomic problems within the state and to the larger issue 
of democracy in international relations. It will be 
unfortunate if all the leaders of thought are to be 
other than church members, for the churches by rea- 
son of their organization and their traditional hold 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 147 

upon mankind could, under enlightened leadership, 
vastly accelerate our social and moral progress. We 
may hope that a wave of religious feeling, the product 
of this war with its suffering and its spiritual lessons, 
may revivify the church and restore it to its proper 
place as a guiding moral force in the regeneration 
of society. But it is at best only a hope, not an ex- 
pectation. 

It is to a newer conception of God, one more in 
accord with modem science and philosophy than the 
traditional God of theology, that we turn most hope- 
fully after speculating upon the ills of society and 
the means to their elimination. Only as we con- 
ceive of God not as a static first cause of a universe 
fated to grow upon predetermined lines, but as a crea- 
tive spiritual force struggling to achieve a finer world, 
does human effort seem significant, worthy, and hope- 
ful amid a hostile universe. Only then do we find 
consolation in man's conquests of nature and read in 
his faltering progress the augury of a happier future. 
Under such a God we are all brothers in imperfection 
but brothers too in the attainment of an incalculable 
perfection, whatever we have the courage and will to 
aspire to. It is not a predestined future. We make 
it for ourselves and our children, and the conscious- 
ness of our freedom is the first step to its attainment. 

With this consciousness comes the immediate real- 
ization that only as purpose is unified and men domi- 



148 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

nated by like ideals is rational and swift development 
possible. Amid the clash of individual ambitions 
and international hatreds and rivalries the perfected 
state in which man's conquest of nature is made the 
secure basis for the equal welfare of all has but a faint 
prospect of realization. Those things which divide 
men — rivalry, greed, faith in national destiny, the 
desire for power, pride in caste and creed, trade bar- 
riers — all these must no longer be justified by our 
moral code if men are to work together to achieve 
a better and freer world. Such an enlargement 
of our morality war both facilitates and retards. Our 
alliance wtih England, France and Russia has minim- 
ized many ancient antipathies. But it has created 
hatred of Germany and Austria. If, at the peace, 
we do not attempt to deal justly with our foes, dis- 
criminating between them as men like ourselves and 
the autocracy which they have permitted and which 
we feel endangers the peace of the world, the war 
will have been productive of evil. Perhaps no good 
can fully compensate the cost in any case. We can 
only do our best to pluck something of value from 
the wreck of so much that was good — from the lives 
of men and the work of their hands. 

Essential to this effort to turn great evil to partial 
good is the recognition of our failure to achieve 
democracy and freedom and a resolution to do better. 
If we triumph in the war and emerge complacent and 



THE NEW SOCIAL MORALITY 149 

self-righteous, achieving meanwhile a political and 
economic administration whose possibilities of evil 
and enslavement are as great as its possibilities of 
freedom, then we shall learn to our cost that the 
liberty for which we have fought and suffered is a 
mirage. New wars for liberty will need to be fought 
and the lesson which this war should teach us will 
need to be relearned and at great cost. An enlight- 
ened morality is the first essential, one that transcends 
class, creed, racial distrust, and a narrow patriotism. 
The new morality demands that the conduct of the in- 
dividual and the group shall be governed by the desire 
so to act that the welfare of men the world over shall 
be enlarged thereby; not the welfare only of oneself, 
one's caste, or one's country, but the welfare of all 
men. 



SOME PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS 

It has been the purpose of this book to make clear 
the need of domestic reforms if a world organiza- 
tion for the maintenance of peace is to persist. The 
democratization of the world demands that the various 
civilized peoples enlarge their conceptions of democ- 
racy and strive, by means of domestic institutions 
more subject than now to popular control and more 
expressive of popular aims, to attain such. The 
peace itself and its immediate terms must necessarily 
be something of a compromise. It can hardly realize 
completely the most liberal thought and aspiration of 
our day. At best it will be but a tentative essay, its 
terms serving as a basis for a firmer international 
organization than heretofore, one sufficing until the 
various contracting nations shall have achieved a 
truer democracy than now, and until the checks im- 
posed upon the spirit of autocracy and militarism 
shall have demonstrated their fitness or unfitness to 
their end and their need of revision and supplement. 

The conclusion of a peace will not, in a very real 
sense, end the war, for the war has passed far beyond 
its original aims. It is no longer merely a contest 

150 



SOME PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS 151 

between nations but a conflict between opposed ideals. 
It is the first and most violent stage of a revolution, of 
a battle between autocracy and democracy, of free- 
dom and capitalism, of men and things. How long 
such a contest may persist no one dare prophesy. Its 
more violent manifestations may easily continue be- 
yond our day, and something resembling the realiza- 
tion of our best ideals of social and political institu- 
tions may not be achieved in two generations. Free- 
dom is not won at a blow nor perfection achieved by 
an act of will. 

We face an uncertain era, one of which we may say 
ultimately, "Joy was it then to be alive"; for none 
of us is so obscure or so devoid of influence that he 
may not do his part in preparing the way for better 
things, for a finer order of life than is now possible 
in our money-making age with its selfish and material 
ambitions. We look forward to a time when partici- 
pation in the comforts and leisure of life shall not 
be the privilege of a few but the lot of all; when the 
joy of genuinely creative work shall be experienced 
by every one; and when every boy and girl shall be 
fitted by education and opportunity to the best ex- 
pression of his latent powers. Our civilization is 
wasteful of the powers of men, inhibiting them or per- 
verting them to base uses. The revolution which is 
now gathering power has as its simple objective, I 
take it, the reorganization of society to the end that 



152 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

men and women everywhere may have life more 
abundantly; that they may live in communities which 
do not repress or pervert their best potentialities but 
give these a fair field for growth and harvest. 

We in the United States face, I believe, a more 
difficult task than that confronting any other of the 
great nations. We are largely inchoate. Many of 
our constituent groups lack leadership and a voice. 
We do not clearly realize our condition nor the prob- 
lems which confront us. Cherishing in our innocence 
the belief that we are a free and democratic people, 
we are only now awakening to the realization that 
our democratic institutions are not adequate to their 
purposes, for we do not govern ourselves so fully as 
we should and must if we are to attain an industrial 
democracy. Wealth has undue power among us. 
A group relatively small in numbers but great in skill 
and influence constitutes our ruling class. The means 
by which it governs I have discussed in another chap- 
ter, and the program which we must follow if condi- 
tions are to be changed for the better. But what are 
the immediate political and social objects which we 
should pursue? 

We can, I think, do no better than to turn our 
eyes towards England and take a leaf from her ex- 
perience. England in her economic and social legis- 
lation has always anticipated us by a quarter or a 
half a century. Observe, notably, her experience 



SOME PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS 153 

with labour-unionism, her factory acts, her industrial 
insurance, her old age pensions. And at the present 
time the carefully formulated program of her labour 
party should afford us an object lesson. The indus- 
trial evolution of England has been more rapid than 
that of the United States. But we can accelerate our 
pace if we will but look abroad and heed. In so 
doing we can obviate many conflicts and much suff'er- 
ing which would otherwise be inevitable in our indus- 
trial development. 

Class consciousness in England is more alive than 
here; the means to its political expression is better 
perfected. We are still a prey to the awkward and 
undemocratic two party system which does not per- 
mit minority groups anything like a proportional 
voice in our domestic aff'airs. Our immediate re- 
forms, then, such as are practicable in the near fu- 
ture and are a necessary prelude to a more thorough 
reorganization of our society, I take to be these : 

1. A reform of our electoral machinery which shall 
permit minority representation in Congress. 

2. The consequent abolition of the two party sys- 
tem and the substitution of the group system whereby 
labour shall find a voice in legislation. 

3. The political union of agricultural and indus- 
trial labour and the formulation of a common pro- 
gram. 

4. The alliance of the professional and intellectual 



154 THE WORLD PEACE AND AFTER 

workers with the manual workers for the purpose of 
securing greater political power. 

Of these I regard the last as the most important. 
It should provide the masses with leaders and a voice 
whereby other necessary changes may be realized. 
Organization, a program, a clear-eyed class conscious- 
ness are our immediate needs before we can proceed 
intelligently to reconstruct our political and economic 
order. 



THE END 



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